Tag: Poetry
-
O Solitude!
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,— Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild…
-
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What…
-
Writing as a Search for Wisdom
THE POET by ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above; Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love. He saw thro’ life and death, thro’ good and ill, He saw thro’ his own soul. The marvel of the everlasting will, An…
-
Walt Whitman in the Civil War
I worry that a book like THE BETTER ANGEL by Roy Morris Jr. in 2000 would not get written today because Walt Whitman, despite nursing thousands of young, suffering soldiers in overfilled hospitals who fought a war that freed slaves, expressed what we consider today to be offensive (and ignorant) opinions about slaves. Racism…
-
Task of a Poet
“To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the…
-
Family Histories: Kin Types by Luanne Castle
By combining a passion for family history with my creative writing, I felt able to—for a brief moment—inhabit the lives of women and men from previous generations and imagine how their stories felt to them.
-
A Mother Who Read to Me
The Reading Mother by Strickland Gillilan I had a mother who read to me Sagas of pirates who scoured the sea, Cutlasses clenched in their yellow teeth, “Blackbirds” stowed in the hold beneath. I had a Mother who read me lays Of ancient and gallant and golden days; Stories of Marmion and Ivanhoe, Which every…
-
Country accomodations
He went by sleep that drowsy route To the surmising Inn At day break to begin his race Or ever to remain Emily Dickinson Save Save
-
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Let not ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. Nor you, ye proud, impute to those the fault, If memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise, Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing…
-
Into the dusk of the East, Gray with the coming of night, This may we know at least– After the night comes light! Over the mariners’ graves, Grim in the depths below, Buoyantly breasting the waves, Into the East we go. On to a distant strand, Wonderful, far, unseen, On to a stranger land, Skimming…
Author Adrienne Morris 