Knowledge poems
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Adam: A Sacred Drama. Act 3.
© William Cowper
Eve. Adam, my best beloved!
My guardian and my guide!
Thou source of all my comfort, all my joy!
Thee, thee alone I wish,
And in these pleasing shades
Thee only have I sought.
To E.S. Salomon
© Ambrose Bierce
What! Salomon! such words from you,
Who call yourself a soldier? Well,
The Southern brother where he fell
Slept all your base oration through.
On An Old Sepuchral Bas-Relief
© Giacomo Leopardi
WHERE IS SEEN A YOUNG MAIDEN, DEAD, IN THE ACT OF DEPARTING,
TAKING LEAVE OF HER FAMILY.
Amours De Voyage, Canto V
© Arthur Hugh Clough
Pisa, they say they think, and so I follow to Pisa,
Hither and thither inquiring. I weary of making inquiries.
I am ashamed, I declare, of asking people about it.-
Who are your friends? You said you had friends who would certainly know them.
The Princes' Quest - Part the Seventh
© William Watson
But Sleep, who makes a mist about the sense,
Doth ope the eyelids of the soul, and thence
Charity : A Paraphrase On 1 Cor. Chap. 13
© Matthew Prior
Did sweeter Sounds adorn my flowing Tongue,
Than ever Man pronounc'd, or Angel sung:
Language Lessons by Alexandra Teague : American Life in Poetry #223 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
© Ted Kooser
There's lots of literature about the loss of innocence, because we all share in that loss and literature is about what we share. Here's a poem by Alexandra Teague, a San Franciscan, in which a child's awakening to the alphabet coincides with another awakening: the unsettling knowledge that all of us don't see things in the same way.
Language Lessons
The carpet in the kindergarten room
Paradise Lost : Book IX.
© John Milton
No more of talk where God or Angel guest
With Man, as with his friend, familiar us'd,
Within and Without: Part II: A Dramatic Poem
© George MacDonald
Julian.
Hm! ah! I see.
What kind of man is this Nembroni, nurse?
Book Seventh [Residence in London]
© William Wordsworth
Returned from that excursion, soon I bade
Farewell for ever to the sheltered seats
Of gowned students, quitted hall and bower,
And every comfort of that privileged ground,
Well pleased to pitch a vagrant tent among
The unfenced regions of society.
Grace Of The Way
© Francis Thompson
'My brother!' spake she to the sun;
The kindred kisses of the stars
Were hers; her feet were set upon
The moon. If slumber solved the bars
Maha-Bharata, The Epic Of Ancient India - Book XII - Aswa-Medha - (Sacrifice Of The Horse)
© Romesh Chunder Dutt
The real Epic ends with the war and the funerals of the deceased
warriors. Much of what follows in the original Sanscrit poem is
Vesalius In Zante
© Edith Wharton
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earths millions.
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem
© Jean Ingelow
'Many,' methought, 'and rich
They must have been, so long their chronicle.
Perhaps the world was fuller then of folk,
For ships at sea are few that near us now.'
The Scout Toward Aldie
© Herman Melville
Nine Blue-coats went a-nutting
Slyly in Tennessee-
Not for chestnuts - better than that-
Hugh, you bumble-bee!
Nutting, nutting -
All through the year there's nutting!
The Angel In The House. Book II. Canto IX.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
III Disappointment
The bliss which woman's charms bespeak,
I've sought in many, found in none!
In many 'tis in vain you seek
What can be found in only one.
