Imagination poems
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Ginza Samba
© Robert Pinsky
A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Ode To Meaning
© Robert Pinsky
Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the torah.
"I'll drown my book" says Shakespeare.
The Stupid Jerk I'm Obsessed With
© Maggie Estep
The stupid jerk I'm obsessed with
stands so close to me
I can feel his breath
on my neck
Endymion: Book II
© John Keats
He heard but the last words, nor could contend
One moment in reflection: for he fled
Into the fearful deep, to hide his head
From the clear moon, the trees, and coming madness.
Endymion: Book III
© John Keats
"Young man of Latmos! thus particular
Am I, that thou may'st plainly see how far
This fierce temptation went: and thou may'st not
Exclaim, How then, was Scylla quite forgot?
Endymion: Book I
© John Keats
This said, he rose, faint-smiling like a star
Through autumn mists, and took Peona's hand:
They stept into the boat, and launch'd from land.
Hyperion
© John Keats
BOOK I Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Emblems of Love
© Lascelles Abercrombie
And mine is all like one rapt faculty,
As it were listening to the love in thee,
My whole mortality trembling to take
Thy body like heard singing of thy spirit.
Exaggeration
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
WE overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination (given us to bring down
The choirs of singing angels overshone
By God's clear glory) down our earth to rake
The Drowned Man
© Alexander Pushkin
Translated by: Genia Gurarie, 11/95
Copyright retained by Genia Gurarie.
email: egurarie@princeton.edu
http://www.princeton.edu/~egurarie/
For permission to reproduce, write personally to the translator.
At the Window
© Paul Eluard
I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among us. There was
a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain indifference, I
have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because I had nothing to
say. The necessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by a thread.
A poem, on the rising glory of America
© Hugh Henry Brackenridge
LEANDER.
Or Roanoke's and James's limpid waves
The sound of musick murmurs in the gale;
Another Denham celebrates their flow,
In gliding numbers and harmonious lays.
A Distance From The Sea
© Weldon Kees
"And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was
about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and
write them not." --REVELATIONS, x, 4.
Georgic on Memory
© Erin Belieu
Make your daily monument the Ego,
use a masochist's epistemology
of shame and dog-eared certainty
that others less exacting might forgo.
An Essay On Criticism
© Alexander Pope
But you who seek to give and merit Fame,
And justly bear a Critick's noble Name,
Be sure your self and your own Reach to know.
How far your Genius, Taste, and Learning go;
Launch not beyond your Depth, but be discreet,
And mark that Point where Sense and Dulness meet.
The Deserted Garden
© Alan Seeger
I know a village in a far-off land
Where from a sunny, mountain-girdled plain
With tinted walls a space on either hand
And fed by many an olive-darkened lane
A Garden In Chicago
© Karl Shapiro
A gutter of poetry flowed outside the yard,
Making me think I was a bird of prose;
For overhead, bagged in a golden cloud,
There hung the fatted souls of animals,
Wile at my eyes bright dots of butterflies
Turned off and on like distant neon signs.
Meditation On Saviors
© Robinson Jeffers
I
When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
little troublesome, a little terrible.
The gleam of an heroic Act
© Emily Dickinson
The gleam of an heroic Act
Such strange illumination
The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.
