Shockingly Beautiful Poems
These are the most beautiful poems of all time, in my not-always-humble opinion...
The Most Beautiful Poems in the English Language, Some Via Translation
These are the most beautiful poems of all time, or at least the most beautiful poems that I have encountered in a lifetime of wide and diligent reading, the utterly transcendent masterpieces...
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Its loveliness increases; it will never
pass into nothingness ...
―John Keats
These are my top ten most beautiful poems of all time, expanded to a baker’s dozen, and all appear on this page.
The Wild Swans at Coole by William Butler Yeats
Requiescat by Oscar Wilde
Song for the Last Act by Louise Bogan
Music When Soft Voices Die (To —) by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Sweet Rose of Virtue by William Dunbar
La Figlia Che Piange (The Weeping Girl) by T. S. Eliot
Bread and Music by Conrad Aiken
Piano by D. H. Lawrence
Song (“When I am dead, my dearest”) by Christina Rossetti
Go, Lovely Rose by Edmund Waller
To Earthward by Robert Frost
A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman
There are also works in this collection that I believe remain beautiful in translation, including poems by Basho, Li Bai, Baudelaire, Hafez, Issa, Lorca, Neruda, Pindar, Pushkin, Rilke, Rimbaud and Sappho, among others.
Which is the most beautiful poem of all? Only you, the reader, can ultimately decide, but I intend to present some worthy candidates for your consideration. I have selected the poems herein primarily for their beauty; other poems may be more philosophical, more innovative, etc., but in my opinion there is something utterly captivating ― something transcendent ― about beauty. It can be refreshing to put aside all other criteria and simply contemplate those poems most likely to be "a joy forever." But first, like the poets of yore, I will invoke the Muse ...
Sappho of Lesbos is the first great female poet still known to us today, and she remains one of the very best poets of all time, regardless of gender. Sappho is so revered for her erotic love poetry that we get our terms "sapphic" and "lesbian" from her name and island of residence. Sappho was called the Tenth Muse by her peers, and the other nine Muses were goddesses, so she was very highly esteemed. I will invoke Sappho as this page's Muse ...
Sing, my sacred tortoiseshell lyre;
come, let my words
accompany your voice.
—Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Our term "lyric" derives from the lyre, a harp-like instrument played by ancient poets like Sappho as they either sang or chanted their poems. Thus Sappho as the Tenth Muse may be considered the mother of all lyric poets and singer-songwriters who followed her.
These are shockingly beautiful ancient Greek epigrams:
Euryalus, born of the blue-eyed Graces,
scion of the bright-tressed Seasons,
son of the Cyprian,
whom dew-lidded Persuasion birthed among rose-blossoms.
—Ibykos/Ibycus, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Mnemosyne was stunned into astonishment when she heard honey-tongued Sappho, wondering how mortal men merited a tenth Muse. — Antipater of Sidon, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I sought the Goddess in your body’s curves and crevasses.—attributed to Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
More of my Sappho translations can be found here: Sappho Translations.
Athens, celestial city, crowned with violets, beloved of poets, bulwark of Greece!
—Pindar, fragment 64, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Fairest of all preludes is mine to incomparable Athens
as I lay the foundation of songs for the mighty race of Alcmaeonidae and their majestic steeds.
Among all the nations, which heroic house compares with glorious Hellas?
—Pindar, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
This is an ancient Roman epigram that I have long admired:
Warmthless beauty attracts but does not hold us; it floats like hookless bait. — Gaius Ateius Capito, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Oscar Wilde may be the most notorious "bad boy" in the annals of poetry and literature, or he’s up there with Lord Byron and Walt Whitman, the latter a possible lover. Wilde was flamboyantly gay at a time when polite society was prim, proper and violently homophobic. As a result, he was sentenced to hard labor at Reading Gaol and died soon after his release. Wilde is justly famous for his disdain for dull and dulling conformity, as his witty epigrams attest. But this lovely, wonderfully moving elegy he wrote for his sister Isola, who died at age ten, proves that he was a true poet capable of creating timeless art.
Requiescat
by Oscar Wilde
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
William Butler Yeats is the most famous Irish poet and his poems of unrequited love for the beautiful revolutionary Maud Gonne have helped preserve her memory. The first poem below is a loose translation of a Ronsard poem, in which Yeats imagines the love of his life in her later years, tending a fire. The second poem, "The Wild Swans at Coole," is surely one of the most beautiful poems ever written, in any language.
When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Yeats’s beautiful, touching sonnet — I prefer the original definition of the sonnet as a “little song” to rigid formulas — inspired this poem of mine:
Hearthside
by Michael R. Burch
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep...”
For all that we professed of love, we knew
this night would come, that we would bend alone
to tend wan fires’ dimming bars—the moan
of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew
an eerie presence on encrusted logs
we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves.
The books that line these close, familiar shelves
loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs,
too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park,
as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss.
I do not know the words for easy bliss
and so my shriveled fingers clutch this stark,
long-unenamored pen and will it: Move.
I loved you more than words, so let words prove.
In my sonnet as the aging Yeats seeks to warm himself by a fire conjured from ice-encrusted logs, he imagines his Muse and the love of his life, Maud Gonne, doing the same. Although Yeats had insisted that he couldn’t be happy without Gonne, she said otherwise: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you!”
The Wild Swans at Coole
by William Butler Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
In my opinion the ancient Middle English poem “How Long the Night” is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language:
How Long the Night
anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants’ song …
but now I feel the northern wind’s blast—
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.
William Dunbar (1460-1525) was one of the first great Scottish poets, and is probably best known today for his poem "Lament for the Makiris" (i.e., Lament for the Makers, or Poets). But this is my favorite poem of his―one I loved so much I chose to translate it myself:
Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue men hold most dear―
except only that you are merciless.
Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I found flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet nowhere one leaf nor petal of rue.
I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair flower and left her downcast;
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that I long to replant love's root again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.
If the tenth line seems confusing, it helps to know that rue symbolizes pity and also has medicinal uses; thus I believe the unrequiting lover is being accused of a lack of compassion and perhaps of withholding her “healing” attentions. The penultimate line can be taken as a rather naughty double entendre, but I will leave that interpretation up to the reader!
Merciles Beaute (”Merciless Beauty”)
by Geoffrey Chaucer, the first major English poet
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.
Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart’s wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.
By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.
To read more Chaucer translations with the original Middle English texts, please click or tap here: Geoffrey Chaucer.
Charles d’Orleans (c. 1394-1465) was a medieval French poet who also wrote poems in Middle English. The Duke of Orleans was a master of the ballade, the chanson (song), the rondeaux/rondel, the complaint and the carol. He has been called the “father of French lyric poetry” and has also been credited with writing the first Valentine’s Day poem.
Ballade: Oft in My Thought
by Charles d’Orleans
translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch
So often in my busy mind I sought,
Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty that I really ought
To give my lady dear;
But that sweet thought’s been wrested from me, clear,
Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
And robbed the world of all that’s precious here―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
For me to keep my manner and my thought
Acceptable, as suits my age’s hour?
While proving that I never once forgot
Her worth? It tests my power!
I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
For it would be a shame for me to stray
Far from my faith, when my time’s drawing near—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
And the cost of everything became so dear;
Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
As heaven’s truest maid! And may I say:
Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
And makes me wish to dress for my own bier—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
More translations can be read here: Charles d’Orleans
The Maiden’s Song aka The Bridal Morn
anonymous Medieval lyric
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The maidens came to my mother’s bower.
I had all I would, that hour.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Now silver is white, red is the gold;
The robes they lay in fold.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Still through the window shines the sun.
How should I love, yet be so young?
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the “big six” English Romantic poets, along with his friend John Keats.
This is an especially lovely example of Shelley's wonderful touch with rhythm and rhyme:
Music When Soft Voices Die (To —)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
The next poem is interesting not only because it's lovely and touching, but because the poet, Kevin Nicholas Roberts, claimed to be the reincarnation of Algernon Charles Swinburne. And it was Swinburne who introduced the rondel to English poetry, adapting it from the French rondeau. You can learn more about Kevin Roberts and read more of his poems by clicking his hyperlinked name.
Rondel
by Kevin N. Roberts
Our time has passed on swift and careless feet,
With sighs and smiles and songs both sad and sweet.
Our perfect hours have grown and gone so fast,
And these are things we never can repeat.
Though we might plead and pray that it would last,
Our time has passed.
Like shreds of mist entangled in a tree,
Like surf and sea foam on a foaming sea,
Like all good things we know can never last,
Too soon we'll see the end of you and me.
Despite the days and realms that we amassed,
Our time has passed.
Song for the Last Act
by Louise Bogan
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.
Now that I have your face by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
Knowledge
by Louise Bogan
Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—
I’ll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn (1877-1909), was a British poet and high-profile lesbian of the Belle Époque who wrote French poems in the style of the Symbolistes and Parnassiens.
Undine
by Renee Vivien
translation/interpretation by Kim Cherub (an alias of Michael R. Burch)
Your laughter startles, your caresses rake.
Your cold kisses love the evil they do.
Your eyes—blue lotuses drifting on a lake.
Lilies are less pallid than your face.
You move like water parting.
Your hair falls in rootlike tangles.
Your words like treacherous rapids rise.
Your arms, flexible as reeds, strangle,
Choking me like tubular river reeds.
I shiver in their enlacing embrace.
Drowning without an illuminating moon,
I vanish without a trace,
lost in a nightly swoon.
Song
by Renee Vivien
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
When the moon weeps,
illuminating flowers on the graves of the faithful,
my memories creep
back to you, wrapped in flightless wings.
It’s getting late; soon we will sleep
(your eyes already half closed)
steeped
in the shimmering air.
O, the agony of burning roses:
your forehead discloses
a heavy despondency,
though your hair floats lightly …
In the night sky the stars burn whitely
as the Goddess nightly
resurrects flowers that fear the sun
and die before dawn …
More Renee Vivien translations along with the original French poems can be read here: Renee Vivien
Elinor Wylie was "famous during her life almost as much for her ethereal beauty and personality as for her melodious, sensuous poetry."
Cold-Blooded Creatures
by Elinor Wylie
Man, the egregious egoist
(In mystery the twig is bent)
Imagines, by some mental twist,
That he alone is sentient
Of the intolerable load
That on all living creatures lies,
Nor stoops to pity in the toad
The speechless sorrow of his eyes.
He asks no questions of the snake,
Nor plumbs the phosphorescent gloom
Where lidless fishes, broad awake,
Swim staring at a nightmare doom.
Cherokee Travelers’ Blessing I
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I will extract the thorns from your feet.
Yet a little longer we will walk life’s sunlit paths together.
I will love you like my own brother, my own blood.
When you are disconsolate, I will wipe the tears from your eyes.
And when you are too sad to live, I will put your aching heart to rest.
When my father chose to end his life by forgoing dialysis, I chose to translate Native American travelers’ blessings, prayers and proverbs that I found comforting and hoped he might as well. You can find the collection here: Native American Poems, Prayers and Proverbs.
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet, politician and diplomat who wrote poems in Spanish. He won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. And he may have been the best love poet of modern times ...
You can crop all the flowers but you cannot detain spring.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
If nothing can save us from death,
still love can redeem each breath.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Every Day You Play (Excerpt)
by Pablo Neruda
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Every day you play with Infinity’s rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water.
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp tightly
like a cornucopia, every day, between my hands ...
Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.
I long for your liquid laughter,
for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
I lust for your fingernails’ pale marbles.
I want to devour your breasts like almonds, whole.
I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
to lick your eyelashes’ flickering shade.
I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
seeking your heart’s scorching heat
like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.
More of my Neruda translations can be read here: Pablo Neruda.
These are my translations of poems by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who also wrote poems in French.
Archaischer Torso Apollos (”Archaic Torso of Apollo”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes’ forfeited visions. But still
the figure’s trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a lamp lit from within, while his composed will
emanates dynamism. Otherwise
the firmly muscled abdomen could not beguile us,
nor the centering loins make us smile
at the thought of their generative animus.
Otherwise the stone might seem deficient,
unworthy of the broad shoulders, of the groin
projecting procreation’s triangular spearhead upwards,
unworthy of the living impulse blazing wildly within
like an inchoate star—demanding our belief.
You must change your life.
Der Panther (”The Panther”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
His weary vision’s so overwhelmed by iron bars,
his exhausted eyes see only blank Oblivion.
His world is not our world. It has no stars.
No light. Ten thousand bars. Nothing beyond.
Lithe, swinging with a rhythmic easy stride,
he circles, his small orbit tightening,
an electron losing power. Paralyzed,
soon regal Will stands stunned, an abject thing.
Only at times the pupils’ curtains rise
silently, and then an image enters,
descends through arrested shoulders, plunges, centers
somewhere within his empty heart, and dies.
Herbsttag (”Autumn Day”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
Lay your long shadows over the sundials
and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
Urge them to completion, and with power
convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, never will build one.
Who’s alone now, shall continue alone;
he’ll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.
The translations below can be read here: Rainer Maria Rilke
Hafez aka Hafiz is one of the more appealing love poets among the ancients, a great spirit as well as a great poet ...
Infectious!
by Hafez aka Hafiz
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I became infected with happiness tonight
as I wandered idly, singing in the starlight.
Now I'm wonderfully contagious—
so kiss me!
Langston Hughes wrote many fine poems; for me this is the most beautiful and touching ...
Island
by Langston Hughes
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.
Sylvia Plath was one of the first and arguably the best of the modern confessional poets. She won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for her Collected Poems after committing suicide at the age of 31, something she seemed to have been predicting in her writing and practicing for in real life.
Poppies In October
by Sylvia Plath
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
Winter landscape, with rocks
by Sylvia Plath
Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,
plunges headlong into that black pond
where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan
floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind
which hungers to haul the white reflection down.
The austere sun descends above the fen,
an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look
longer on this landscape of chagrin;
feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,
brooding as the winter night comes on.
Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice
as is your image in my eye; dry frost
glazes the window of my hurt; what solace
can be struck from rock to make heart's waste
grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place?
Anne Sexton was a model who became a confessional poet, writing about intimate aspects of her life, after her doctor suggested that she take up poetry as a form of therapy. She studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University, where Sylvia Plath was one of her classmates. Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, but later committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. Topics she covered in her poems included adultery, masturbation, menstruation, abortion, despair and suicide.
The Truth the Dead Know
by Anne Sexton
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Li Bai (701-762) was a romantic figure who has been called the Lord Byron of Chinese poetry. He and his friend Du Fu (712-770) were the leading poets of the Tang Dynasty era, which has been called the “Golden Age of Chinese poetry.” Li Bai is also known as Li Po, Li Pai, Li T’ai-po, and Li T’ai-pai.
Quiet Night Thoughts
by Li Bai
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Moonlight illuminates my bed
as frost brightens the ground.
Lifting my eyes, the moon allures.
Lowering my eyes, I long for home.
My interpretation of this famous poem is a bit different from the norm. The moon symbolizes love, so I imagine the moon shining on Li Bai’s bed to be suggestive, an invitation. A man might lower his eyes to avoid seeing something his wife would not approve of.
Lines from Laolao Ting Pavilion
by Li Bai
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The spring breeze knows partings are bitter;
The willow twig knows it will never be green again.
A Toast to Uncle Yun
by Li Bai
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Water reforms, though we slice it with our swords;
Sorrow returns, though we drown it with our wine.
Dylan Thomas's elegy to his dying father is one of the best villanelles in the English language, and it remains a powerful, haunting poem.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In My Craft Or Sullen Art
by Dylan Thomas
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
Arthur Rimbaud was the enfant terrible of poetry, but gave up writing poetry in his early twenties to become a soldier, arms dealer and (some say) a slave trader, although to my knowledge there is no evidence of the latter.
Ophélie (“Ophelia”), an Excerpt
by Arthur Rimbaud
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
On pitiless black waves unsinking stars abide
… while pale Ophelia, a lethargic lily, drifts by …
Here, tangled in her veils, she floats on the tide …
Far-off, in the woods, we hear the strident bugle’s cry.
For a thousand years, or more, sad Ophelia,
This albescent phantom, has rocked here, to and fro.
For a thousand years, or more, in her gentle folly,
Ophelia has rocked here when the night breezes blow.
For a thousand years, or more, sad Ophelia,
Has passed, an albescent phantom, down this long black river.
For a thousand years, or more, in her sweet madness
Ophelia has made this river shiver.
Drunken Morning, or, Morning of Drunkenness
by Arthur Rimbaud
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Oh, my Beautiful! Oh, my Good!
Hideous fanfare wherein I won’t stumble!
Oh, rack of splendid enchantments!
Huzzah for the virginal!
Huzzah for the immaculate work!
For the marvelous body!
The rest of “Drunken Morning” and other Rimbaud poems can be read here: Arthur Rimbaud
Stéphane Mallarmé was a French symbolist widely considered to have been a major French poet of the second half of the 19th century, along with Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.
The Tomb of Edgar Poe
by Stephane Mallarme
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Transformed into himself by Death, at last,
the Bard unsheathed his Art’s recondite blade
to duel with dullards, blind & undismayed,
who’d never heard his ardent Voice, aghast!
Like dark Medusan demons of the past
who’d failed to heed such high, angelic words,
men called him bendered, his ideas absurd,
discounting all the warlock’s spells he’d cast.
The wars of heaven and hell? Earth’s senseless grief?
Can sculptors carve from myths a bas-relief
to illuminate the sepulcher of Poe?
No, let us set in granite, here below,
a limit and a block on this disaster:
this Blasphemy, to not acknowledge a Master!
“Le Cygne” (”The Swan”)
by Stéphane Mallarmé
this untitled poem is also called Mallarmé’s “White Sonnet”
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The virginal, the vivid, the vivacious day:
can its brilliance be broken by a wild wing-blow
delivered to this glacial lake
whose frozen ice-falls impede flight? No.
In past reflections on its thoughts today
the Swan remembers freedom, yet can’t make
a song from its surroundings, only take
on the winter’s ghostly hue of snow.
In the Swan’s white agony its bared neck lies
within an icy guillotine its sense denies.
Slowly being frozen to its inner being,
the body ignores the phantom spirit fleeing …
Cold contempt for its captor
does not avail the raptor.
More Mallarme translations, along with the original French texts, can be read here: English Translations of French Poets by Michael R. Burch
Edward Thomas is not as well-known as some of the other poets on this page, but "Adlestrop" was among the top ten most requested poems at Poetry Please, so he continues to have fans. "Adlestrop" is a somewhat mysterious poem, because nothing really happens and yet it seems extraordinarily sad.
Adlestrop
by Edward Thomas
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English romantic poet, painter, illustrator and translator. He was also one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His art was characterized by sensuality and medieval revivalism. In 1850 he met Elizabeth Siddal, who became his model, his passion, and eventually in 1860, his wife.
Sudden Light
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sister Christina was also a poet, and perhaps the better of the two.
Song
by Christina Rossetti
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
Conrad Aiken was one of the sweetest singers among American poets.
Bread and Music
by Conrad Aiken
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.
D. H. Lawrence is better known today for his novels, which include the then-infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover, but he was also one of the better early modernist poets.
Piano
by D. H. Lawrence
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was openly bisexual and had affairs with other women and married men. When she finally married, hers was an open marriage. Her 1920 poetry collection A Few Figs From Thistles drew controversy for its novel exploration of female sexuality. She was one of the earliest and strongest voices for what became known as feminism. One of the recurring themes of her poetry was that men might use her body, but not possess her nor have any claim over her. (And perhaps their desire for her body gave her the upper hand in relationships.)
I, Being Born a Woman, and Distressed
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I, being born a woman, and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, this poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity — let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
There are more poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay later on this page.
THE MUSE
by Anna Akhmatova
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My being hangs by a thread tonight
as I await a Muse no human pen can command.
The desires of my heart — youth, liberty, glory —
now depend on the Maid with the flute in her hand.
Look! Now she arrives; she flings back her veil;
I meet her grave eyes — calm, implacable, pitiless.
“Temptress, confess!
Are you the one who gave Dante hell?”
She answers, “Yes.”
Excerpt from “Poems for Akhmatova”
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You outshine everything, even the sun
at its zenith. The stars are yours!
If only I could sweep like the wind
through some unbarred door,
gratefully, to where you are ...
to hesitantly stammer, suddenly shy,
lowering my eyes before you, my lovely mistress,
petulant, chastened, overcome by tears,
as a child sobs to receive forgiveness ...
Emily Dickinson was the first great female American poet.
Come Slowly, Eden
by Emily Dickinson
Come slowly—Eden
Lips unused to thee—
Bashful—sip thy jasmines—
As the fainting bee—
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—
Counts his nectars—alights—
And is lost in balms!
Go, Lovely Rose
by Edmund Waller
Go, lovely Rose,—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retir'd:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desir'd,
And not blush so to be admir'd.
Then die, that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share,
That are so wondrous sweet and fair.
VIII — from "Sunday Morning"
by Wallace Stevens
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old despondency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
by Ernest Dowson
"I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynara"—Horace
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
La Figlia Che Piange (The Weeping Girl)
by T. S. Eliot
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair —
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise —
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight, and the noon's repose.
The Garden
by Ezra Pound
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
Lullaby
by W. H. Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstacy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost.
All the dreaded cards foretell.
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought.
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
Bertolt Brecht fled Nazi Germany along with Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and many other German intellectuals. So he was writing from bitter real-life experience.
The Burning of the Books
by Bertolt Brecht
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.
Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged — he’d been excluded!
He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fiery letters to the incompetents in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen —
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!
Parting
by Bertolt Brecht
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
We embrace;
my fingers trace
rich cloth
while yours encounter only moth-
eaten fabric.
A quick hug:
you were invited to the gay soiree
while the minions of the “law” relentlessly pursue me.
We talk about the weather
and our eternal friendship’s magic.
Anything else would be too bitter,
too tragic.
The Mask of Evil
by Bertolt Brecht
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
A Japanese carving hangs on my wall —
the mask of an ancient demon, limned with golden lacquer.
Not altogether unsympathetically, I observe
the bulging veins of its forehead, noting
the grotesque effort it takes to be evil.
More translations can be read here: Bertolt Brecht
Would it surprise you to know that one of the most beautiful (and saddest) poems in the English language was written by a child prodigy, Thomas Chatterton? Although his mother and family considered him to be "slow," around age seven the young Chatterton discovered an ancient book with illuminated capital letters, and he suddenly became intensely interested, quickly learned to read, and then began writing poems. By age ten he was a published poet. But many of the poems he wrote were in a medieval version of English, and no one would believe that a child was capable of writing such poems. So he pretended to have "found" the poems of an ancient monk named Thomas Rowley. One thing led to another, and Chatterton was accused of being a "forger" even though the poems were his original compositions! Spurned by stuffy literary types and unable to support himself, but too proud to accept handouts, Chatterton committed suicide at age 17. You can click or tap his hyperlinked name to read the full poem and others he wrote during his short, tortured life.
Song from Ælla: Under the Willow Tree, or, Minstrel's Roundelay
by Thomas Chatterton
...
See! the white moon shines on high;
Whiter is my true-love's shroud:
Whiter than the morning sky,
Whiter than the evening cloud:
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow-tree.
...
You can read the remainder of this marvelous poem, and other poems by the boy wonder here: Thomas Chatterton.
Sir Thomas Wyatt has been credited with introducing the Petrarchan sonnet into the English language. Wyatt's father had been one of Henry VII's Privy Councilors and he remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. Wyatt followed his father to court, but it seems the young poet may have fallen in love with the king’s mistress, Anne Boleyn. Their acquaintance is certain, although whether or not the two actually shared a romantic relationship remains unknown. But in his poetry, Wyatt called his mistress Anna and there do seem to be correspondences. For instance, this poem might well have been written about the King’s claim on Anne Boleyn:
Whoso List to Hunt
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
Noli me tangere means "Touch me not." According to the Bible, this is what Jesus said to Mary Magdalene when she tried to embrace him after the resurrection. So perhaps after her betrothal to Henry, religious vows entered into the picture, and left Wyatt out.
This is my attempt at a modernization of the poem:
Whoever Longs to Hunt
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
modernization by Michael R. Burch
Whoever longs to hunt, I know the deer;
but as for me, alas!, I may no more.
This vain pursuit has left me so bone-sore
I'm one of those who falters, at the rear.
Yet friend, how can I draw my anguished mind
away from the doe?
Thus, as she flees before
me, fainting I follow.
I must leave off, therefore,
since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Whoever seeks her out,
I relieve of any doubt,
that he, like me, must spend his time in vain.
For graven with diamonds, set in letters plain,
these words appear, her fair neck ringed about:
Touch me not, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an early advocate of women's rights, and a staunch opponent of slavery. When she married Robert Browning, theirs became the most famous coupling in the annals of English poetry.
How Do I Love Thee?
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
For Her Surgery
by Jack Butler
I
Over the city the moon rides in mist,
scrim scarred with faint rainbow.
Two days till Easter. The thin clouds run slow, slow,
the wind bells bleed the quietest
of possible musics to the dark lawn.
All possibility we will have children is gone.
II
I raise a glass half water, half alcohol,
to that light come full again.
Inside, you sleep, somewhere below the pain.
Down at the river, there is a tall
ghost tossing flowers to dark water—
jessamine, rose, and daisy, salvia lyrata . . .
III
Oh goodbye, goodbye to bloom in the white blaze
of moon on the river, goodbye
to creek joining the creek joining the river, the axil, the Y,
goodbye to the Yes of two Ifs in one phrase . . .
Children bear children. We are grown,
and time has thrown us free under the timeless moon.
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Tom Merrill is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and in my opinion one of the very best living poets.
Come Lord and Lift
by Tom Merrill
Come Lord, and lift the fallen bird
Abandoned on the ground;
The soul bereft and longing so
To have the lost be found.
The heart that cries—let it but hear
Its sweet love answering,
Or out of ether one faint note
Of living comfort wring.
The Death of a Toad
by Richard Wilbur
A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.
The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,
Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.
To Earthward
by Robert Frost
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of – was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young:
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass or sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.
Depths
by Richard Moore
Once more home is a strange place: by the ocean a
big house now, and the small houses are memories,
once live images, vacant
thoughts here, sinking and vanishing.
Rough sea now on the shore thundering brokenly
draws back stones with a roar out into quiet and
far depths, darkly to lie there
years, years—there not a sound from them.
New waves out of the night's mist and obscurity
lunge up high on the beach, spending their energy,
each wave angrily dying,
all shapes endlessly altering,
yet out there in the depths nothing is modified.
Earthquakes won't even move—no, nor the hurricane—
one stone there, nor a glance of
sun's light stir its identity.
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Winter Night
by Robert Fitzgerald
The grey day left the dusk in doubt,
Now it is dark.
Nightfall and no stars are out,
But this black wind will set its mark
Like anger on the souls that stir
From chimney side or sepulcher.
From hill to pasture moans the snow.
The farms hug tight
Their shaking ribs against the blow.
There is no mercy in this night
Nor scruple to its wrath. The dead
Sleep light this wind being overhead.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
by Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
To Celia
by Ben Jonson
Drink to me, only, with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee,
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st back to me:
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
To Daffodils
by Robert Herrick
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon.
As yet the early-rising sun
Hath not attained his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you;
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or any thing.
We die.
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew
Ne'er to be found again.
Cradle Song
by William Blake
Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night;
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.
Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.
As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.
O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.
Tears, Idle Tears
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
Acquainted With The Night
by Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Song
by John Donne
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devils foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.
The Convergence Of The Twain
by Thomas Hardy
Lines on the loss of the "Titanic"
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"...
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
Luke Havergal
by Edward Arlington Robinson
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen, she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that's in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall,
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.
Full Fathom Five
by William Shakespeare
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — ding-dong, bell.
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
by William Wordsworth
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Song of Solomon
attributed to King Solomon
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes,
and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor wake my love, till he please.
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
A Red, Red Rose
by Robert Burns
Oh my luve is like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
Oh my luve is like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!
Upon Julia's Clothes
by Robert Herrick
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
Oh, how that glittering taketh me!
She Walks In Beauty
by Lord Bryon
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Spring Song
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Hark, I hear a robin calling!
List, the wind is from the south!
And the orchard-bloom is falling
Sweet as kisses on the mouth.
In the dreamy vale of beeches
Fair and faint is woven mist,
And the river's orient reaches
Are the palest amethyst.
Every limpid brook is singing
Of the lure of April days;
Every piney glen is ringing
With the maddest roundelays.
Come and let us seek together
Springtime lore of daffodils,
Giving to the golden weather
Greeting on the sun-warm hills.
Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Song of a Second April
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.
The larger streams run still and deep,
Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun,
Pensively,—only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.
Shattered
by Vera Pavlova
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I shattered your heart;
now I limp through the shards
barefoot.
Wulf and Eadwacer
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My clan’s curs pursue him like crippled game;
they’ll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.
Wulf’s on one island; I’m on another.
His island’s a fortress, fastened by fens. (fastened=secured)
Here, bloodthirsty curs howl for carnage.
They’ll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.
My hopes pursued Wulf like panting hounds,
but whenever it rained—how I wept!—
the boldest cur clutched me in his paws:
good feelings to a point, but the end loathsome!
Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your seldom-comings
have left me famished, deprived of real meat.
Have you heard, Eadwacer? Watchdog!
A wolf has borne our wretched whelp to the woods.
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.
Was the first truly great poem of the English language written by a female scop, if “Wulf” predates “Beowulf”? What an earthy, down-and-dirty, brutally honest poem written from a female perspective.
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) was a Russian poet, playwright and novelist. He has been called Russia’s greatest poet and the founder and father of modern Russian literature.
I Loved You
by Alexander Pushkin
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
1.
I loved you once … perhaps I love you still …
perhaps such erratic flickerings remain.
But please don’t let my feelings trouble you;
I do not wish to cause you further pain.
I loved you … thus the hopelessness I knew …
the jealousy, the shyness and the pain,
resulted in my hope that somehow you
might find the grace to fall in love again.
Friendship
by Alexander Pushkin
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
What’s “friendship”? The hangover’s daze,
The mild aftermath of outrage,
Exchanges in a wounded ego’s haze,
The humiliation of patronage.
Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and theater director. He was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and his body was never found.
Paisaje (“Landscape”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The olive orchard
opens and closes
like a fan;
above the grove
a sunken sky dims;
a dark rain falls
on warmthless lights;
reeds tremble by the gloomy river;
the colorless air wavers;
olive trees
scream with flocks
of captive birds
waving their tailfeathers
in the dark.
Canción del jinete (“The Horseman’s Song” or “Song of the Rider”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Cordoba. Distant and lone.
Black pony, big moon,
olives in my saddlebag.
Although my pony knows the way,
I never will reach Cordoba.
High plains, high winds.
Black pony, blood moon.
Death awaits me, watching
from the towers of Cordoba.
Such a long, long way!
Oh my brave pony!
Death awaits me
before I arrive in Cordoba!
Cordoba. Distant and lone.
More Lorca translations can be read here: Federico Garcia Lorca
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a major French poet and early Symbolist.
Le Balcon (The Balcony)
by Charles Baudelaire
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Paramour of memory, ultimate mistress,
source of all pleasure, my only desire;
how can I forget your ecstatic caresses,
the warmth of your breasts by the roaring fire,
paramour of memory, ultimate mistress?
Each night illumined by the burning coals
we lay together where the rose-fragrance clings—
how soft your breasts, how tender your soul!
Ah, and we said imperishable things,
each night illumined by the burning coals.
How beautiful the sunsets these sultry days,
deep space so profound, beyond life’s brief floods …
then, when I kissed you, my queen, in a daze,
I thought I breathed the bouquet of your blood
as beautiful as sunsets these sultry days.
Night thickens around us like a wall;
in the deepening darkness our irises meet.
I drink your breath, ah! poisonous yet sweet!,
as with fraternal hands I massage your feet
while night thickens around us like a wall.
I have mastered the sweet but difficult art
of happiness here, with my head in your lap,
finding pure joy in your body, your heart;
because you’re the queen of my present and past
I have mastered love’s sweet but difficult art.
O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Can these be reborn from a gulf we can’t sound
as suns reappear, as if heaven misses
their light when they sink into seas dark, profound?
O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
More Baudelaire translations can be read here: Charles Baudelaire
Il pleure dans mon coeur (”It rains in my heart”)
by Paul Verlaine
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
It rains in my heart
As it rains on the town;
Heavy languor and dark
Drenches my heart.
Oh, the sweet-sounding rain
Cleansing pavements and roofs!
For my listless heart’s pain
The pure song of the rain!
Still it rains without reason
In my overcast heart.
Can it be there’s no treason?
That this grief’s without reason?
As my heart floods with pain,
Lacking hatred, or love,
I’ve no way to explain
Such bewildering pain!
My Verlaine translations with the original French text can be read here: Paul Verlaine
Les Vous et Les Tu (“You, then and now”)
by Voltaire
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Phyllis, whatever became of those days
We spent riding in your carriage,
Lacking both lackeys and trappings,
Accompanied only by your graceful charms
And content with a humble supper
Which you (of course) transformed into ambrosia …
Days when you abandoned yourself in your folly
To the happily deceived lover
Who so earnestly pledged you his life?
Heaven had bequeathed you, then,
In lieu of prestige and riches,
The enchanting enticements of youth:
A tender heart, an adventurous mind,
An alabaster breast and exquisite eyes.
Well, with so many luring allurements,
Ah! what girl would have not been mischievous?
And so you were, graceful creature.
And thus (and may Love forgive me!)
You know I desired you all the more.
Ah, Madame! How your life,
So filled with honors today,
Differs from those lost enchantments!
This hulking guardian with the powdered hair
Who lies incessantly at your door,
Phyllis, is the very avatar of Time:
See how he dismisses the escorts
Of tender Love and Laughter;
Those orphans no longer dare show their faces
Beneath your magnificent paneled ceilings.
Alas! in happier days I saw them
Enter your home through a glassless window
To frolic in your hovel.
No, Madame, all these carpets
Spun at the Savonnerie
And so elegantly loomed by the Persians;
And all your golden jewelry;
And all this expensive porcelain
Germain engraved with his divine hand;
And all these cabinets in which Martin
Surpassed the art of China;
And all your white vases,
Such fragile Japanese wonders!;
And the twin chandeliers of diamonds
Dangling from your ears;
And your costly chokers and necklaces;
And all this spellbinding pomp;
Are not worth a single kiss
You blessed me with when you were young.
Love Stronger than Time
by Victor Hugo
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Since I first set my lips to your full cup,
Since my pallid face first nested in your hands,
Since I sensed your soul and every bloom lit up—
Till those rare perfumes were lost to deepening sands;
Since I was first allowed these pleasures deep—
To hear your heart speak mysteries, divine;
Since I have seen you smile, have watched you weep,
Your lips pressed to my lips, your eyes on mine;
Since I have sensed above my thoughts the gleam
Of a ray, a single ray, of your bright star
(If sometimes veiled), and felt light, falling, stream
Like one rose petal plucked from high, afar;
I now can say to time’s swift-changing hours:
“Pass, pass upon your way, for you grow old;
Flee to the dark abyss with your drear flowers,
but one unmarred within my heart I hold.
Your flapping wings may jar but cannot spill
The cup fulfilled of love, from which I drink;
My heart has fires your frosts can never chill,
My soul more love to fly than you can sink.”
Paul Valéry was buried in the seaside cemetery evoked in his best-known poem. From the vantage of the cemetery, the tombs seemed to “support” a sea-ceiling dotted with white sails. Valéry begins and ends his poem with this image …
Excerpts from “Le cimetière marin”(“The graveyard by the sea”)
from Charmes ou poèmes (1922)
by Paul Valéry
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Do not, O my soul, aspire to immortal life, but exhaust what is possible.
—Pindar, Pythian Ode 3
1.
This tranquil ceiling, where white doves are sailing,
stands propped between tall pines and foundational tombs,
as the noonday sun composes, with its flames,
sea-waves forever forming and reforming …
O, what a boon, when some lapsed thought expires,
to reflect on the placid face of Eternity!
5.
As a pear dissolves in the act of being eaten,
transformed, through sudden absence, to delight
relinquishing its shape within our mouths,
even so, I breathe in vapors I’ll become,
as the sea rejoices and its shores enlarge,
fed by lost souls devoured; more are rumored.
6.
Beautiful sky, my true-blue sky, ’tis I
who alters! Pride and indolence possessed me,
yet, somehow, I possessed real potency …
But now I yield to your ephemeral vapors
as my shadow steals through stations of the dead;
its delicate silhouette crook-fingering “Forward!”
8.
… My soul still awaits reports of its nothingness …
9.
… What corpse compels me forward, to no end?
What empty skull commends these strange bone-heaps?
A star broods over everything I lost …
10.
… Here where so much antique marble
shudders over so many shadows,
the faithful sea slumbers …
11.
… Watchful dog …
Keep far from these peaceful tombs
the prudent doves, all impossible dreams,
the angels’ curious eyes …
12.
… The brittle insect scratches out existence …
… Life is enlarged by its lust for absence …
… The bitterness of death is sweet and the mind clarified.
13.
… The dead do well here, secured here in this earth …
… I am what mutates secretly in you …
14.
I alone can express your apprehensions!
My penitence, my doubts, my limitations,
are fatal flaws in your exquisite diamond …
But here in their marble-encumbered infinite night
a formless people sleeping at the roots of trees
have slowly adopted your cause …
15.
… Where, now, are the kindly words of the loving dead? …
… Now grubs consume, where tears were once composed …
16.
… Everything dies, returns to earth, gets recycled …
17.
And what of you, great Soul, do you still dream
there’s something truer than deceitful colors:
each flash of golden surf on eyes of flesh?
Will you still sing, when you’re as light as air?
Everything perishes and has no presence!
I am not immune; Divine Impatience dies!
18.
Emaciate consolation, Immortality,
grotesquely clothed in your black and gold habit,
transfiguring death into some Madonna’s breast,
your pious ruse and cultivated lie:
who does not know and who does not reject
your empty skull and pandemonic laughter?
24.
The wind is rising! … We must strive to live!
The immense sky opens and closes my book!
Waves surge through shell-shocked rocks, reeking spray!
O, fly, fly away, my sun-bedazzled pages!
Break, breakers! Break joyfully as you threaten to shatter
this tranquil ceiling where white doves are sailing!
Ode secrète (“Secret Ode”)
by Paul Valéry
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The fall so exquisite, the ending so soft,
the struggle’s abandonment so delightful:
depositing the glistening body
on a bed of moss, after the dance!
Who has ever seen such a glow
illuminate a triumph
as these sun-brightened beads
crowning a sweat-drenched forehead!
Here, touched by the dusk’s last light,
this body that achieved so much
by dancing and outdoing Hercules
now mimics the drooping rose-clumps!
Sleep then, our all-conquering hero,
come so soon to this tragic end,
for now the many-headed Hydra
reveals its Infiniteness …
Behold what Bull, what Bear, what Hound,
what Visions of limitless Conquests
beyond the boundaries of Time
the soul imposes on formless Space!
This is the supreme end, this glittering Light
beyond the control of mere monsters and gods,
as it gloriously reveals
the matchless immensity of the heavens!
To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl, an Austrian poet who wrote in German
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring’s blue coolness.
Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds’ flight.
Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.
A thornbush crackles;
where now are your moonlike eyes?
How long, oh Elis, have you been dead?
A monk dips waxed fingers
into your body’s hyacinth;
Our silence is a black abyss
from which sometimes a docile animal emerges
slowly lowering its heavy lids.
A black dew drips from your temples:
the lost gold of vanished stars.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: I believe that in the second stanza the blood on Elis’s forehead may be a reference to the apprehensive bloody sweat of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. If my interpretation is correct, Elis hears the blackbird’s cries, anticipates the danger represented by a harbinger of death, but elects to continue rather than turn back. From what I have been able to gather, the color blue had a special significance for Georg Trakl: it symbolized longing and perhaps a longing for death. The colors blue, purple and black may represent a progression toward death in the poem.
To a Daughter More Precious than Gems
by Otomo no Sakanoue no Iratsume (c. 700-750), a Japanese poet
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Heaven’s cold dew has fallen
and thus another season arrives.
Oh, my child living so far away,
do you pine for me as I do for you?
I have trusted my jewel to the gem-guard;
so now there’s nothing to do, my pillow,
but for the two of us to sleep together!
I cherished you, my darling,
as the Sea God guards his treasury’s pearls.
But you are pledged to your husband
(such is the way of the world)
and have been torn from me like a blossom.
I left you for faraway Koshi;
since then your lovely eyebrows
curving like distant waves
ever linger in my eyes.
My heart is as unsteady as a rocking boat;
besieged by such longing I weaken with age
and come close to breaking.
If I could have prophesied such longing,
I would have stayed with you,
gazing on you constantly
as into a shining mirror.
I gaze out over the fields of Tadaka
seeing the cranes that cry there incessantly:
such is my longing for you.
Oh my child,
who loved me so helplessly
like bird hovering over shallow river rapids!
Dear child, my daughter, who stood
sadly pensive by the gate,
even though I was leaving for a friendly estate,
I think of you day and night
and my body has become thin,
my sleeves tear-stained with weeping.
If I must long for you so wretchedly,
how can I remain these many months
here at this dismal old farm?
Because you ache for me so intently,
your sad thoughts all confused
like the disheveled tangles of your morning hair,
I see you, dear child, in my dreams.
Otomo no Sakanoue no Iratsume (c. 700-750) was an important ancient Japanese poet. She had 79 poems in Manyoshu (”Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”), the first major anthology of classical Japanese poetry, mostly waka. The compiler of the anthology was Otomo no Yakamochi (c. 718-785). Otomo no Sakanoue no Iratsume was his aunt, tutor and poetic mentor. In the first stanza, Lady Otomo has left her children in Nara, possibly to visit her brother. In the second stanza, it is believed that the jewel is Lady Otomo’s daughter and that she has been trusted to the care of her husband. As for the closing stanza, according to the notes of the Manyoshu, it was popularly believed that a person would appear in the dreams of the one for whom he/she yearned.
Mehmet Akif Ersoy (1873-1936) was a Turkish poet, author, writer, academic, member of parliament, and the composer of the Turkish National Anthem.
Snapshot
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Earth’s least trace of life cannot be erased;
even when you lie underground, it encompasses you.
So, those of you who anticipate the shadows,
how long will the darkness remember you?
Ben Sana Mecburum: “You are indispensable”
by Attila Ilhan
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch
You are indispensable; how can you not know
that you’re like nails riveting my brain?
I see your eyes as ever-expanding dimensions.
You are indispensable; how can you not know
that I burn within, at the thought of you?
Trees prepare themselves for autumn;
can this city be our lost Istanbul?
Now clouds disintegrate in the darkness
as the street lights flicker
and the streets reek with rain.
You are indispensable, and yet you are absent …
Love sometimes seems akin to terror:
a man tires suddenly at nightfall,
of living enslaved to the razor at his neck.
Sometimes he wrings his hands,
expunging other lives from his existence.
Sometimes whichever door he knocks
echoes back only heartache.
A screechy phonograph is playing in Fatih …
a song about some Friday long ago.
I stop to listen from a vacant corner,
longing to bring you an untouched sky,
but time disintegrates in my hands.
Whatever I do, wherever I go,
you are indispensable, and yet you are absent …
Are you the blue child of June?
Ah, no one knows you—no one knows!
Your deserted eyes are like distant freighters …
perhaps you are boarding in Yesilköy?
Are you drenched there, shivering with the rain
that leaves you blind, beset, broken,
with wind-disheveled hair?
Whenever I think of life
seated at the wolves’ table,
shameless, yet without soiling our hands …
Yes, whenever I think of life,
I begin with your name, defying the silence,
and your secret tides surge within me
making this voyage inevitable.
You are indispensable; how can you not know?
Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), the Grande Dame of Palestinian letters, is also known as “the Poet of Palestine.” She is generally considered to be one of the very best contemporary Arab poets. The sister of the poet Ibrahim Tuqan, she was born in Nablus in 1917. She began writing in traditional forms, but became one of the leaders of the use of the free verse in Arabic poetry. Her work often deals with feminine explorations of love and social protest, particularly of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
Enough for Me
by Fadwa Tuqan, a Palestinian poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Enough for me to lie in the earth,
to be buried in her,
to sink meltingly into her fecund soil, to vanish …
only to spring forth like a flower
brightening the play of my countrymen’s children.
Enough for me to remain
in my native soil’s embrace,
to be as close as a handful of dirt,
a sprig of grass,
a wildflower.
More translations can be read here: Fadwa Tuqan.
Walid Khazindar was born in 1950 in Gaza City. He is considered to be one of the very best Palestinian poets; his poetry has been said to be “characterized by metaphoric originality and a novel thematic approach unprecedented in Arabic poetry.” He was awarded the first Palestine Prize for Poetry in 1997.
This Distant Light
by Walid Khazindar
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Bitterly cold,
winter clings to the naked trees.
If only you would free
the bright sparrows
from your fingertips
and unleash a smile—that shy, tentative smile—
from the imprisoned anguish I see.
Sing! Can we not sing
as if we were warm, hand-in-hand,
sheltered by shade from a sweltering sun?
Can you not always remain like this:
stoking the fire, more beautiful than expected, in reverie?
Darkness increases and we must remain vigilant
now that this distant light is our sole consolation …
this imperiled flame, which from the beginning
has constantly flickered,
in danger of going out.
Come to me, closer and closer.
I don’t want to be able to tell my hand from yours.
And let’s stay awake, lest the snow smother us.
Now skruketh rose and lylie flour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa 11th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Now the rose and the lily skyward flower,
That will bear for awhile that sweet savor:
In summer, that sweet tide;
There is no queen so stark in her power
Nor any lady so bright in her bower
That Death shall not summon and guide;
But whoever forgoes lust, in heavenly bliss will abide
With his thoughts on Jesus anon, thralled at his side.
Erinna is widely regarded as second only to Sappho among the ancient Greek female poets. The first poem, about the portrait of a girl or young woman named Agatharkhis, has been called the earliest Greek ekphrastic epigram (an epigram describing a work of art):
This portrait is the work of sensitive, artistic hands.
See, noble Prometheus, you have human equals!
For if whoever painted this girl had only added a voice,
she would have been Agatharkhis entirely.
—Erinna, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Erinna wrote a number of touching epitaphs for her beloved friend Baucis, who apparently died shortly before her wedding, including this one:
Passerby, passing by my oft-bewailed pillar,
shudder, my new friend to hear my tragic story:
of how my pyre was lit by the same fiery torch
meant to lead the procession to my nuptials in glory!
O Hymenaeus, why did you did change
my bridal song to a dirge? Strange!
—Erinna, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
In 1928, Italian archaeologists excavating at Oxyrhynchus discovered a tattered piece of papyrus which contained 54 lines of Erinna’s lost epic, the poem “Distaff.” This work, like the epigram above, was about her friend Baucis or Baukis.
Excerpts from “Distaff”
by Erinna
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
… the moon rising …
… leaves falling …
… waves lapping a windswept shore …
… and our childish games, Baucis, do you remember? …
… Leaping from white horses into the deeper waves,
running on reckless feet through the great courtyard.
“You’re it!’ I cried, ‘You’re the Tortoise now!”
But when your turn came to pursue your pursuers,
you darted beyond the courtyard,
dashed out deep into the waves,
splashing far beyond us …
… My poor Baucis, these tears I now weep are your warm memorial,
these traces of embers still smoldering in my heart
for our silly amusements, now that you lie ash …
… Do you remember how, as girls,
we played at weddings with our dolls,
pretending to be brides in our innocent beds? …
… How sometimes I was your mother,
allotting wool to the weaver-women,
calling for you to unreel the thread? …
… Do you remember our terror of the monster Mormo
with her huge ears, her forever-flapping tongue,
her four slithering feet, her shape-shifting face? …
… Until you mother called for us to help with the salted meat …
… But when you mounted your husband’s bed,
dearest Baucis, you forgot your mothers’ warnings!
Aphrodite made your heart forgetful …
… Desire becomes oblivion …
… Now I lament your loss, my dearest friend.
I can’t bear to think of that dark crypt.
I can’t bring myself to leave the house.
I refuse to profane your corpse with my tearless eyes.
I refuse to cut my hair, but how can I mourn with my hair unbound?
I blush with shame at the thought of you! …
… But in this dark house, O my dearest Baucis,
My deep grief is ripping me apart.
Wretched Erinna! Only nineteen,
I moan like an ancient crone, eying this strange distaff …
O Hymen! … O Hymenaeus! …
Alas, my poor Baucis!
In my opinion “Distaff” is one of the most touching elegies ever written, in any language.
Haiku and Tanka
Haiku and Tanka can be similar to the best Greek epigrams: short and sweet, or (more often) short and bittersweet. Here’s my translation of one of my favorite haiku, by the master Basho:
The first soft snow:
leaves of the awed jonquil
bow low
―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Here’s another haiku I particularly love:
Oh, fallen camellias,
if I were you,
I’d leap into the torrent!
―Takaha Shugyo, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
This is one of my favorite tanka:
Our life here on earth:
to what shall we compare it?
It is not like a rowboat
departing at daybreak,
leaving no trace of man in its wake?
―Takaha Shugyo, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Here are more of my haiku and tanka translations; every other poem is by the Master Basho; I consider him one of the greatest poets of all time, in any language:
Winter in the air:
my neighbor,
how does he fare? …
―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
A kite floats
at the same place in the sky
where yesterday it floated …
―Yosa Buson, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Come, investigate loneliness!
a solitary leaf
clings to the Kiri tree
―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Grasses wilt:
the braking locomotive
grinds to a halt
―Yamaguchi Seishi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Let us arrange
these lovely flowers in the bowl
since there’s no rice
―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Wild geese pass
leaving the emptiness of heaven
revealed
―Takaha Shugyo, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
An ancient pond,
the frog leaps:
the silver plop and gurgle of water
―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Do we not all live,
in the end,
in phantom dwellings?
—Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Leaves
like crows’ shadows
flirt with a lonely moon.
—Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Fukuda Chiyo-ni (1703-1775), also known as Kaga no Chiyo, was a Japanese poet, painter and calligrapher of the Edo period. She began writing haiku at age seven and by age seventeen was popular throughout Japan. At age 52 she became a Buddhist nun, shaved her head, adopted the name Soen (“Escape”), and took up residence in a temple.
Ah butterfly,
what dreams do you ply
with your beautiful wings?
—Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Because morning glories
held my well-bucket hostage
I went begging for water!
—Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Chiyo-ni wrote this next poem in calligraphy on a portrait of Matsuo Basho. I take it to mean that she liked Basho’s poetry but wanted to develop her own unique voice.
To listen, fine ...
fine also not to echo,
nightingale.
—Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Composed like the Thinker, he sits
contemplating the mountains:
the sagacious frog!
―Kobayashi Issa, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
This world?
Moonlit dew
flicked from a crane’s bill.
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Seventy-one?
How long
can a dewdrop last?
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, translation/interpretation of his jisei (death poem) by Michael R. Burch
Poems about Moscow
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
5
Above the city Saint Peter once remanded to hell
now rolls the delirious thunder of the bells.
As the thundering high tide eventually reverses,
so, too, the woman who once bore your curses.
To you, O Great Peter, and you, O Great Tsar, I kneel!
And yet the bells above me continually peal.
And while they keep ringing out of the pure blue sky,
Moscow’s eminence is something I can’t deny …
though sixteen hundred churches, nearby and afar,
all gaily laugh at the hubris of the Tsars.
The Guest
by Anna Akhmatova
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Everything’s the same: a driving snow
Hammers the dining room windows.
Meanwhile, I remain my usual self.
But a man came to me.
I asked him, “What do you want?”
“To be with you in hell.”
I laughed: “It’s plain you intend
To see us both damned!”
But he lifted his elegant hand
to lightly caress the flowers.
“Tell me how they kiss you,
Tell me how you kiss.”
His eyes, observing me blankly,
Never moved from my ring,
Nor did a muscle move
In his implacable face.
We both know his delight
is my unnerving knowledge
that he is indifferent to me,
that I can refuse him nothing.
THE MUSE
by Anna Akhmatova
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My being hangs by a thread tonight
as I await a Muse no human pen can command.
The desires of my heart — youth, liberty, glory —
now depend on the Maid with the flute in her hand.
Look! Now she arrives; she flings back her veil;
I meet her grave eyes — calm, implacable, pitiless.
“Temptress, confess!
Are you the one who gave Dante hell?”
She answers, “Yes.”
Rabindranath Tagore was a major Indian poet who wrote poems in Bengali.
The Seashore Gathering
by Rabindranath Tagore
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
On the seashores of endless worlds, earth’s children converge.
The infinite sky is motionless, the restless waters boisterous.
On the seashores of endless worlds earth’s children gather to dance with joyous cries and pirouettes.
They build sand castles and play with hollow shells.
They weave boats out of withered leaves and laughingly float them out over the vast deep.
Earth’s children play gaily on the seashores of endless worlds.
They do not know, yet, how to cast nets or swim.
Divers fish for pearls and merchants sail their ships, while earth’s children skip, gather pebbles and scatter them again.
They are unaware of hidden treasures, nor do they know how to cast nets, yet.
The sea surges with laughter, smiling palely on the seashore.
Death-dealing waves sing the children meaningless songs, like a mother lullabying her baby’s cradle.
The sea plays with the children, smiling palely on the seashore.
On the seashores of endless worlds earth’s children meet.
Tempests roam pathless skies, ships lie wrecked in uncharted waters, death wanders abroad, and still the children play.
On the seashores of endless worlds there is a great gathering of earth’s children.
Come As You Are
by Rabindranath Tagore
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Come as you are, forget appearances!
Is your hair untamable, your part uneven, your bodice unfastened? Never mind.
Come as you are, forget appearances!
Skip with quicksilver steps across the grass.
If your feet glisten with dew, if your anklets slip, if your beaded necklace slides off? Never mind.
Skip with quicksilver steps across the grass.
Do you see the clouds enveloping the sky?
Flocks of cranes erupt from the riverbank, fitful gusts ruffle the fields, anxious cattle tremble in their stalls.
Do you see the clouds enveloping the sky?
You loiter in vain over your toilet lamp; it flickers and dies in the wind.
Who will care that your eyelids have not been painted with lamp-black, when your pupils are darker than thunderstorms?
You loiter in vain over your toilet lamp; it flickers and dies in the wind.
Come as you are, forget appearances!
If the wreath lies unwoven, who cares? If the bracelet is unfastened, let it fall. The sky grows dark; it is late.
Come as you are, forget appearances!
Only Let Me Love You
by Michael R. Burch
after Rabindranath Tagore
Only let me love you, and the pain
of living will be easier to bear.
Only let me love you. Nay, refrain
from pinning up your hair!
Only let me love you. Stay, remain.
A face so lovely never needs repair!
Only let me love you to the strains
of Rabindranath on a soft sitar.
Only let me love you, while the rain
makes music: gentle, eloquent, sincere.
Only let me love you. Don’t complain
you need more time to make yourself more fair!
Only let me love you. Stay, remain.
No need for rouge or lipstick! Only share
your tender body swiftly …
The following translations can be read here: Rabindranath Tagore
aaa
He Lived: Excerpts from “Gilgamesh”
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I.
He who visited hell, his country’s foundation,
Was well-versed in mysteries’ unseemly dark places.
He deeply explored many underworld realms
Where he learned of the Deluge and why Death erases.
II.
He built the great ramparts of Uruk-the-Sheepfold
And of holy Eanna. Then weary, alone,
He recorded his thoughts in frail scratchings called “words”:
Frail words made immortal, once chiseled in stone.
III.
These walls he erected are ever-enduring:
Vast walls where the widows of dead warriors weep.
Stand by them. O, feel their immovable presence!
For no other walls are as strong as this keep’s.
IV.
Come, climb Uruk’s tower on a starless night—
Ascend its steep stairway to escape modern error.
Cross its ancient threshold. You are close to Ishtar,
the Goddess of Ecstasy and of Terror!
V.
Find the cedar box with its hinges of bronze;
lift the lid of its secrets; remove its dark slate;
read of the travails of our friend Gilgamesh—
of his descent into hell and man’s terrible fate!
VI.
Surpassing all kings, heroic in stature,
Wild bull of the mountains, the Goddess his Dam
—She bedded no man; he was her sole rapture—
Who else can claim fame, as he thundered, “I AM!”
Enkidu Enters the House of Dust
an original poem by Michael R. Burch
I entered the house of dust and grief.
Where the pale dead weep there is no relief,
for there night descends like a final leaf
to shiver forever, unstirred.
There is no hope left when the tree’s stripped bare,
for the leaf lies forever dormant there
and each man cloaks himself in strange darkness, where
all company’s unheard.
No light’s ever pierced that oppressive night
so men close their eyes on their neighbors’ plight
or stare into darkness, lacking sight …
each a crippled, blind bat-bird.
Were these not once eagles, gallant men?
Who sits here—pale, wretched and cowering—then?
O, surely they shall, they must rise again,
gaining new wings? “Absurd!
For this is the House of Dust and Grief
where men made of clay, eat clay. Relief
to them’s to become a mere windless leaf,
lying forever unstirred.”
“Anu and Enlil, hear my plea!
Ereshkigal, they all must go free!
Beletseri, dread scribe of this Hell, hear me!”
But all my shrill cries, obscured
by vast eons of dust, at last fell mute
as I took my place in the ash and soot.
To continue reading more of the most beautiful poems ever written, please check out:
The Most Beautiful Poems in the English Language
Poems by the Masters of English Poetry
Other notable beautiful poems and songs of the English language include:
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
They Flee from Me that Sometime Did Me Seek by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Ode: Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Tom O' Bedlam's Song by Anonymous
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
After the Persian by Louise Bogan
Voyages by Hart Crane
Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane
Forgetfulness by Hart Crane
A Last Word by Ernest Dowson
The Old Lutheran Bells at Home by Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens
Tea at the Palace of Hoon by Wallace Stevens
Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchohare longam by Ernest Dowson
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
And Death Shall Have No Dominion by Dylan Thomas
In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden
Church Going by Philip Larkin
Contemporary Poets
After the Rain by Jared Carter
Friday by Ann Drysdale
Sarabande On Attaining The Age Of Seventy-Seven by Anthony Hecht
Time in Eternity by T. Merrill
The Lovemaker by Robert Mezey
Allayne by Kevin N. Roberts
Part 6 from The Dark Side of the Deity: Interlude by Joe M. Ruggier
The Ghost Ship by A. E. Stallings
Sea Fevers by Agnes Wathall
Songwriters
Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez
I Walk the Line by Johnny Cash
A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke
Blowin' in the Wind by Bob Dylan
If You See Her Say Hello by Bob Dylan
Stan by Eminem
Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson
Been to Canaan by Carole King
Imagine by John Lennon
Let It Be by Paul McCartney
Fallin' by Alicia Keys
I Will Always Love You by Dolly Parton
When Doves Cry by Prince
Tears of a Clown by Smokey Robinson
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
Heart of Gold by Neil Young
Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger and Keith Richards)
Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles (Paul McCartney and John Lennon)
Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel (Paul Simon)
Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe
This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie
Where Have All the Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger
She Belongs To Me by Bob Dylan, suggested by Robert Funderburk
Sunday Morning Comin' Down by Kris Kristofferson, suggested by Robert Funderburk
in Just- by e. e. cummings
since feeling is first by e. e. cummings
Spring and Fall, to a Young Child by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
The Armadillo by Elizabeth Bishop
Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell
Afton Water by Robert Burns
The Light of Other Days by Tom Moore
The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes
A Blessing by James Wright
Naming of Parts by Henry Reed
To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time by Robert Herrick
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
So We'll Go No More A-Roving by Lord Byron
This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams
Ode to Autumn by John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Bright Star by John Keats
Howl by Allen Ginsburg
Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 73: That Time of Year Thou May'st in Me Behold by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 116: Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds by William Shakespeare
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The World Is Too Much with Us by William Wordsworth
It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free by William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth
Birches by Robert Frost
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Mending Wall by Robert Frost
Directive by Robert Frost
After Apple Picking by Robert Frost
The Most of It by Robert Frost
The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by William Butler Yeats
Love Lives Beyond the Tomb by John Clare
I Am by John Clare
Poem in October by Dylan Thomas
Bagpipe Music by Louis MacNeice
Wulf and Eadwacer by Anonymous
The Lie by Sir Walter Raleigh
One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand by Sir Edmund Spenser
Prothalamion by Sir Edmund Spenser
With How Sad Steps, O Moon, Thou Climb'st the Skies by Sir Philip Sidney
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe
On My First Son by Ben Jonson
Virtue by George Herbert
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Lycidas by John Milton
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent by John Milton
To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
They Are All Gone into the World of Light by Henry Vaughan
The Tyger by William Blake
The Lamb by William Blake
London by William Blake
The Sick Rose by William Blake
A Poison Tree by William Blake
Proud Masie by Sir Walter Scott
Rose Aylmer by Walter Savage Landor
Jenny Kissed Me by Leigh Hunt
Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I Am by John Clare
The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe
Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allen Poe
To Helen by Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe
The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Splendor Falls by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Mariana by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
Meeting at Night by Robert Browning
Parting at Morning by Robert Browning
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd by Walt Whitman
Omeros by Derek Walcott
Love After Love by Derek Walcott
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant
Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
Don Juan by Lord Byron
The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
Mac Flecknoe by John Dryden
Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
If by Rudyard Kipling
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
It is Here by Harold Pinter
Exile by Hart Crane
If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda (translation)
His Confession by The Archpoet (translation)
Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke (translation)
Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke (translation)
The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke (translation)
The Inferno by Dante (translation)
The Divine Comedy by Dante (translation)
The Odyssey by Homer (translation)
The Iliad by Homer (translation)
The Aeneid by Virgil (translation)
The Sonnets of Petrarch (translation)
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The HyperTexts
I will share this fine list and article on my Substack shortly.
Thanks to you, I discovered Oscar Wilde's "Requiescat."
I'm going to record that one asap.
Truly beautiful stuff!
😮