Imagination poems
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Epipsychidion
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Sweet Spirit! Sister of that orphan one,
Whose empire is the name thou weepest on,
In my heart's temple I suspend to thee
These votive wreaths of withered memory.
Quatrains
© Edith Matilda Thomas
WHAT if the Soul her real life elsewhere holds,
Her faint reflex Times darkling stream enfolds,
And thou and I, though seeming dwellers here,
Live some where yonder in the starlit sphere?
"For Beauty Being the Best of All We Know"
© Robert Seymour Bridges
For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Dead Butterfly by Ellen Bass: American Life in Poetry #164 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had livedâso brieflyâin its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?
The Art Of War. Book III.
© Henry James Pye
Your footsteps now the arsenals have trod
Where lie the treasures of the warrior God;
Yet 'midst his ranks to serve is little fame,
Little avails the soldier's ardent flame,
Unless to all the heights of art you climb,
And reach of martial skill the true sublime.
A Cloud In Trousers - part II
© Vladimir Mayakovsky
Glorify me!
For me the great are no match.
Upon every achievement
I stamp nihil
A Book Of Strife In The Form Of The Diary Of An Old Soul - May
© George MacDonald
1.
WHAT though my words glance sideways from the thing
An Answer
© Zbigniew Herbert
This will be a night in deep snow
which has the power to muffle steps
in deep shadow transforming
bodies to two puddles of darkness
we lie holding our breath
and even the slightest whisper of thought
A Father To His Son
© Carl Sandburg
A father sees his son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?
Paradise Lost : Book VI.
© John Milton
All night the dreadless Angel, unpursued,
Through Heaven's wide champain held his way; till Morn,
The Building Of The Temple
© Sir Henry Newbolt
O Lord our God, we are strangers before Thee, and sojourners, as were
all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is
none abiding.
The Daemon Of The World
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nec tantum prodere vati,
Quantum scire licet. Venit aetas omnis in unam
Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus.
The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe
© Stéphane Mallarme
Such as at last eternity transforms into Himself,
The Poet rouses with two-edged naked sword,
His century terrified at having ignored
Death triumphant in so strange a voice!
The Task: Book V. -- The Winter Morning Walk
© William Cowper
Tis morning; and the sun, with ruddy orb
Ascending, fires the horizon; while the clouds,
Don Juan: Canto The Fourth
© George Gordon Byron
Nothing so difficult as a beginning
In poesy, unless perhaps the end;
Fragment: "Igniculus Desiderii"
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
To thirst and find no fillto wail and wander
With short unsteady stepsto pause and ponder--
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle;
Naples And Venice
© Richard Monckton Milnes
Thou, who to that lofty terrace, lov'st on summer--eve to go,
Tell me, Poet! what Thou seest,--what Thou hearest, there below!
The Day Of Judgement
© John Newton
Day of judgement, day of wonders!
Hark! the trumpet's awful sound,
Louder than a thousand thunders,
Shakes the vast creation round!
How the summons will the sinner's heart confound.
Don Juan: Canto The Thirteenth
© George Gordon Byron
I now mean to be serious;--it is time,
Since laughter now-a-days is deem'd too serious.
