Christina Rossetti
Richard Wilbur
e e cummings
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
from Uphill by Christina Rossetti
Let Observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru:
Reark each anxious toil, each eager strife:
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate,
O’spread with snares the clouded maze of fate,
Where wavering man, betrayed by venomous pride,
To tread the dreary paths without a guide,
But scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the general massacre of gold;
Wide-wasting pest! That rages unconfined,
And crowds with crimes the record of mankind;
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heaped on wealth, not truth nor safety buys,
The Dangers Gather as the Treasures rise
from The Vanity of Human Wishes (The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated) by Samuel Johnson
We have it and it doesn’t do us any
Good because nobody gets what they
Deserve more than everybody else.
from Family Values by Robert Pinsky
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
from Garden of Proserpine by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
from The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Ralegh
Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
from Hamlen Brook by Richard Wilbur
“I see the guilty world forgiven,”
Dreamer and drunkard sing,
“The ladders let down out of heaven,
The laurel springing from the martyr’s blood,
The children skipping where the weeper stood,
The lovers natural and the beasts all good.”
So dreamer and drunkard sing
Till day their sobriety bring:
Parrotwise with Death’s reply
From whelping fear and nesting lie,
Woods and their echoes ring.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.
from Death’s Echo by W. H. Auden
To fight aloud, is very brave —
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Cavalry of Woe —
from To Fight Aloud is Very Brave by Emily Dickinson
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
from I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke
and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why man breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all
from my father moved through dooms of love by e.e. cummings
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.
from Provide, Provide by Robert Frost
by Richard W. Bray
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