To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

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Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart;
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run

Edna St. Vincent Millay

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The Dream


LOVE, if I weep it will not matter,
And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it,
But it is good to feel you there.

Love, in my sleep I dreamed of waking, --
White and awful the moonlight reached
Over the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,
There was a shutter loose, -- it screeched!

Swung in the wind, -- and no wind blowing! --
I was afraid, and turned to you,
Put out my hand to you for comfort, --
And you were gone! Cold, cold as dew,

Under my hand the moonlight lay!
Love, if you laugh I shall not care,
But if I weep it will not matter, --
Ah, it is good to feel you there!




Ashes of Life


Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will, -- and would that night were here!
But ah! -- to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
Would that it were day again! -- with twilight near!

Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do;
This or that or what you will is all the same to me;
But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through, --
There's little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me, -- and the neighbors knock and borrow,
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse, --
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There's this little street and this little house.

(no subject)

[redheartleaf.livejournal.com]

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter


While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
Played I about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you,
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into fat Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noises overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early in autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet tou
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.


(by Rihaku - translated by Pound)


Pound, Ezra. 1916. Lustra.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was an American-born poet and critic,
who greatly shaped 20th-century English writing. He
graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., in 1905,
earning a M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania the
following year. After a one- year stint teaching in
Indiana, Pound traveled to Europe, publishing his first book
of poetry in 1908.

Having published several books of poetry, including
Personae, Pound became European correspondent for Poetry
magazine. He became involved with the Imagist movement,
which focused on concrete language and figures of speech
(avoiding romantic themes), editing the first Imagist
anthology, Des Imagistes, in 1914.

Pound lived in Paris for four years before moving to Italy,
where he would live for the next 20 years. At around the
same time, he began publishing the first volumes of The
Cantos, a series of poems that he would continue to write
for the rest of his life.

In the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, Pound became
interested in monetary reform, aligning himself with the
politics of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Pound made
several anti-American statements during radio broadcasts
aired over Rome between 1941 and 1943, which culminated in
his arrest by U.S. forces in 1945.

A panel of physicians declared Pound "insane and mentally
unfit" for trial on grounds of treason upon his return to
the United States. While the decision spared Pound's life,
he would spend 12 years at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital before
being released. Once he was released, Pound returned to
Italy where he remained until his death.

(no subject)

[redheartleaf.livejournal.com]

The Bell


I love thy music, mellow bell,
I love thine iron chime,
To life or death, to heaven or hell,
Which calls the sons of Time.

Thy voice upon the deep
The home-bound sea-boy hails,
It charms his cares to sleep,
It cheers him as he sails.

To house of God and heavenly joys
Thy summons called our sires,
And good men thought thy sacred voice
Disarmed the thunder's fires.

And soon thy music, sad death-bell,
Shall lift its notes once more,
And mix my requiem with the wind
That sweeps my native shore.


Emerson, Ralph Waldo.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American poet,
essayist, and philosopher who was a leading proponent of New
England Transcendentalism. Emerson graduated from Harvard
College in 1821 and was ordained a minister eight years
later. Despite his position, Emerson began to question
Christian doctrines, a doubt that grew following the death
of his wife in 1831. He resigned from the ministry in 1832,
and helped to initiate Transcendentalism in 1836 with the
publication of a book titled Nature. In 1840, Emerson
helped to begin The Dial, which served as an outlet for his
ideas and views on Transcendentalism.

Babi Yar- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

[hannahirene.livejournal.com]

( Read more... )

Muriel Stuart

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A SONG FOR OLD LOVE.

There shall be a song for both of us that day
Though fools say you have long outlived your songs,
And when, perhaps, because your hair is grey,
You go unsung, to whom all praise belongs,
And no men kiss your hands--your fragile hands
Folded like empty shells on sea-spurned sands.
And you that were dawn whereat men shouted once
Are sunset now, but with one worshipper,
Then to your twilight heart this song shall be
Sweeter than those that did your youth announce
For your brave beautiful spirit is lovelier
Than once your lovely body was to me.
Your folded hands and your shut eyelids stir
A passion that Time has crowned with sanctity.
Young fools shall wonder why, your youth being over,
You are so sung still, but your heart will know
That he who loved your soul was your true lover
And the last song alone was worthy you.

Sailing to Byzantium-W.B.Yeats

[princebuster.livejournal.com]

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Miles Away - Carol Ann Duffy

[sugarmomma.livejournal.com]

I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight
I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer
than the words I have you say you said before.

Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me
with a look, standing here whilst cool late light
dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,
but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,
inventing love, until the calls of nightjars
interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,
into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.