Beauty poems

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Verses on Sir Joshua Reynold's Painted Window at New College, Oxford

© Thomas Warton

Reynolds, 'tis thine, from the broad window's height,
To add new lustre to religious light:
Not of its pomp to strip this ancient shrine,
But bid that pomp with purer radiance shine:
With arts unknown before, to reconcile
The willing Graces to the Gothic pile.

The Emigrants: Book II

© Charlotte Turner Smith

Scene, on an Eminence on one of those Downs, which afford to the South a view of the Sea; to the North of the Weald of Sussex. Time, an Afternoon in April, 1793.

The Emigrants: Book I

© Charlotte Turner Smith

Scene, on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of

Brighthelmstone in Sussex. Time, a Morning in November, 1792.

Alfred Lord Tennyson - The Coming Of Arthur

© Alfred Tennyson

Leodogran, the King of Cameliard,
Had one fair daughter, and none other child;
And she was the fairest of all flesh on earth,
Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

Days of Pie and Coffee

© James Tate

A motorist once said to me,

and this was in the country,

Amoretti LXXIX: Men Call you Fair

© Edmund Spenser

Men call you fair, and you do credit it,

For that your self ye daily such do see:

A Hymn Of Heavenly Beauty

© Edmund Spenser

Rapt with the rage of mine own ravish'd thought,

Through contemplation of those goodly sights,

Astrophel and Stella: LXXI

© Sir Philip Sidney

Who will in fairest book of nature know

How virtue may best lodg'd in beauty be,

Astrophel and Stella: III

© Sir Philip Sidney

Let dainty wits cry on the sisters nine,

That, bravely mask'd, their fancies may be told;

Astrophel and Stella VII: WhenNature Made her Chief Work

© Sir Philip Sidney

When Nature made her chief work, Stella's eyes,

In colour black why wrapt she beams so bright?

Astrophel and Stella

© Sir Philip Sidney

Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes entendeth,
Which now my breast, surcharg'd, to musick lendeth!
To you, to you, all song of praise is due,
Only in you my song begins and endeth.

Passing away, saith the World

© Christina Georgina Rossetti

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:

Chances, beauty and youth, sapp'd day by day:

God

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,

Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!

The Second Elegy

If only we too could discover a pure contained
human place our own strip of fruit-bearing soil
between river and rock. For our own heart always exceeds us
as theirs did. And we can no longer follow it gazing
into images that soothe it into the godlike bodies
where measured more greatly if achieves a greater repose.