10 Best Famous Bach Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Bach poems. This is a select list of the best famous Bach poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Bach poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of bach poems.

• All Famous Bach Poems

Written by Langston Hughes | Theme For English B The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you-- Then, it will be true. I wonder if it's that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page: It's not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me--we two--you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too.) Me--who? Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records--Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn't make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. You are white-- yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That's American. Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that's true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me-- although you're older--and white-- and somewhat more free. This is my page for English B.

Written by Barry Tebb | To My Wife I You buy my freedom with your love. With every book you catalogue or stamp My imagination hacks a strand from the hawser That for three years has held it In the grubbing estuary of mud and time. Your early waking with tired eyes And late return at evening, all Contribute to the store of images I love you for: the irony being Your job is worse than mine Your talent more. II I do not understand myself, the time, or you. I cannot comprehend our love, shot through Like flying silk with flashes of gold light And the tattered backcloth of suffering. Each night I remember our meeting; My hair ‘like iron wire’, the grey dust In the air of my house, the exact place On the carpet where I kissed you And how we talked on and on, Too much in love for love, Until the night was gone. III We acted out our love By nearly going mad, Gave up the jobs we had To take a cottage on the moors At less than garage rent. For food we learned to pledge our dreams And found, too late, the world redeems What it had lent. By night the world unpicked The dream we wove by day, Each dawn we woke to find The stitching come away. IV Two creatures from a bestiary Besieged our dream: A neighbour’s one-eyed cat That prowled outside to bring Its witch-like owner With her tapping stick. Was the Bach we played too loud for her deaf ears, Or was it our love that howled her silence home? V We have re-built that house With blood. We have sculptured that dream In stone.

Written by Barry Tebb | The Days Go By for Daniel Weissbort Some poems meant only for my eyes About a grief I can’t let go But I want to, want to throw It away like an old worn-out cloak Or screw up like a ball of over-written Trash and toss into the corner bin. I said it must come up or out I don't know which but either way Will do, I know I can't write in the vein Of ‘Bridge’ this time, it takes an optimistic view, Bright day stuff, sunlight on Roundhay Park's Childrens’ Day Or just wandering round the streets With Margaret, occasionally stopping To whisper or to kiss. Now over sixty I wonder How and where to go from here Daniel your rolled out verse Unending Kaddish gave me hints But what can you or anyone say About our son, the other one, who from Such a bright childhood came to such A death-in-life? Dreamless sleep is better than the consciousness Of bitter days; I sit in silent prayer and read Of Job, the Prodigal, the Sermon on the Mount. I read and think and sigh aloud to my silent, Silent self. I write him letters long or short About the weather or a book I've read and hope His studies are kept up. I can’t say ‘How much Do you drink? Is it more or less or just the same?’ Its your own life But then its partly one we shared for years From birth along a road I thought we went Along as one. Some years ago I sensed a change, An invisible glass wall between us, between It seemed you and everyone, the way friends Hurried past, patting your shoulder in passing, A joke in the pub, the Leeds boy who'd made good Then threw it all away for drink. Your boxed-up books, texts in five languages Or six, the well-thumbed classics worn cassettes Of Bach, Tippett’s ‘Knot Garden’, invitation Cards, the total waste, my own and your’s and her’s. Love does not seem an answer That you want to know, The hours, the years of waiting Gather loss on loss until My hopes are brief as days That rush and go like speeding trains That never stop. You drink, I pay, You ramble through an odd text-book And go and eat and drink and talk And lose your way, then phone ‘To set things straight’ but nothing’s Ever straight with you, the binges Start and stop, a local train that Locals know will never go beyond The halt where only you get off.

Written by Charles Bukowski | Friends Within The Darkness I can remember starving in a small room in a strange city shades pulled down, listening to classical music I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible-- not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance: trying to connect. the old composers -- Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and they were dead. finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and monotonous jobs by strange men behind desks men without eyes men without faces who would take away my hours break them piss on them. now I work for the editors the readers the critics but still hang around and drink with Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the Bee some buddies some men sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.

Written by Robert Graves | Letter to S.S. from Mametz Wood I never dreamed we’d meet that day In our old haunts down Fricourt way, Plotting such marvellous journeys there For jolly old “Apr?s-la-guerre.” Well, when it’s over, first we’ll meet At Gweithdy Bach, my country seat In Wales, a curious little shop With two rooms and a roof on top, A sort of Morlancourt-ish billet That never needs a crowd to fill it. But oh, the country round about! The sort of view that makes you shout For want of any better way Of praising God: there’s a blue bay Shining in front, and on the right Snowden and Hebog capped with white, And lots of other jolly peaks That you could wonder at for weeks, With jag and spur and hump and cleft. There’s a grey castle on the left, And back in the high Hinterland You’ll see the grave of Shawn Knarlbrand, Who slew the savage Buffaloon By the Nant-col one night in June, And won his surname from the horn Of this prodigious unicorn. Beyond, where the two Rhinogs tower, Rhinog Fach and Rhinog Fawr, Close there after a four years’ chase From Thessaly and the woods of Thrace, The beaten Dog-cat stood at bay And growled and fought and passed away. You’ll see where mountain conies grapple With prayer and creed in their rock chapel Which Ben and Claire once built for them; They call it S?ar Bethlehem. You’ll see where in old Roman days, Before Revivals changed our ways, The Virgin ’scaped the Devil’s grab, Printing her foot on a stone slab With five clear toe-marks; and you’ll find The fiendish thumbprint close behind. You’ll see where Math, Mathonwy’s son, Spoke with the wizard Gwydion And bad him from South Wales set out To steal that creature with the snout, That new-discovered grunting beast Divinely flavoured for the feast. No traveller yet has hit upon A wilder land than Meirion, For desolate hills and tumbling stones, Bogland and melody and old bones. Fairies and ghosts are here galore, And poetry most splendid, more Than can be written with the pen Or understood by common men. In Gweithdy Bach we’ll rest awhile, We’ll dress our wounds and learn to smile With easier lips; we’ll stretch our legs, And live on bilberry tart and eggs, And store up solar energy, Basking in sunshine by the sea, Until we feel a match once more For anything but another war. So then we’ll kiss our families, And sail across the seas (The God of Song protecting us) To the great hills of Caucasus. Robert will learn the local bat For billeting and things like that, If Siegfried learns the piccolo To charm the people as we go. The jolly peasants clad in furs Will greet the Welch-ski officers With open arms, and ere we pass Will make us vocal with Kavasse. In old Bagdad we’ll call a halt At the S?shuns’ ancestral vault; We’ll catch the Persian rose-flowers’ scent, And understand what Omar meant. Bitlis and Mush will know our faces, Tiflis and Tomsk, and all such places. Perhaps eventually we’ll get Among the Tartars of Thibet. Hobnobbing with the Chungs and Mings, And doing wild, tremendous things In free adventure, quest and fight, And God! what poetry we’ll write!

Written by Stephen Dobyns | Loud Music My stepdaughter and I circle round and round. You see, I like the music loud, the speakers throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut. But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four and likes the music decorous, pitched below her own voice-that tenuous projection of self. With music blasting, she feels she disappears, is lost within the blare, which in fact I like. But at four what she wants is self-location and uses her voice as a porpoise uses its sonar: to find herself in all this space. If she had a sort of box with a peephole and looked inside, what she'd like to see would be herself standing there in her red pants, jacket, yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject for serious study. But me, if I raised the same box to my eye, I would wish to find the ocean on one of those days when wind and thick cloud make the water gray and restless as if some creature brooded underneath, a rocky coast with a road along the shore where someone like me was walking and has gone. Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego, leaving turbulent water and winding road, a landscape stripped of people and language- how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.

Written by Sidney Lanier | Clover Inscribed to the Memory of John Keats. Dear uplands, Chester's favorable fields, My large unjealous Loves, many yet one -- A grave good-morrow to your Graces, all, Fair tilth and fruitful seasons! Lo, how still! The midmorn empties you of men, save me; Speak to your lover, meadows! None can hear. I lie as lies yon placid Brandywine, Holding the hills and heavens in my heart For contemplation. 'Tis a perfect hour. From founts of dawn the fluent autumn day Has rippled as a brook right pleasantly Half-way to noon; but now with widening turn Makes pause, in lucent meditation locked, And rounds into a silver pool of morn, Bottom'd with clover-fields. My heart just hears Eight lingering strokes of some far village-bell, That speak the hour so inward-voiced, meseems Time's conscience has but whispered him eight hints Of revolution. Reigns that mild surcease That stills the middle of each rural morn -- When nimble noises that with sunrise ran About the farms have sunk again to rest; When Tom no more across the horse-lot calls To sleepy Dick, nor Dick husk-voiced upbraids The sway-back'd roan for stamping on his foot With sulphurous oath and kick in flank, what time The cart-chain clinks across the slanting shaft, And, kitchenward, the rattling bucket plumps Souse down the well, where quivering ducks quack loud, And Susan Cook is singing. Up the sky The hesitating moon slow trembles on, Faint as a new-washed soul but lately up From out a buried body. Far about, A hundred slopes in hundred fantasies Most ravishingly run, so smooth of curve That I but seem to see the fluent plain Rise toward a rain of clover-blooms, as lakes Pout gentle mounds of plashment up to meet Big shower-drops. Now the little winds, as bees, Bowing the blooms come wandering where I lie Mixt soul and body with the clover-tufts, Light on my spirit, give from wing and thigh Rich pollens and divine sweet irritants To every nerve, and freshly make report Of inmost Nature's secret autumn-thought Unto some soul of sense within my frame That owns each cognizance of the outlying five, And sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches, all in one. Tell me, dear Clover (since my soul is thine, Since I am fain give study all the day, To make thy ways my ways, thy service mine, To seek me out thy God, my God to be, And die from out myself to live in thee) -- Now, Cousin Clover, tell me in mine ear: Go'st thou to market with thy pink and green? Of what avail, this color and this grace? Wert thou but squat of stem and brindle-brown, Still careless herds would feed. A poet, thou: What worth, what worth, the whole of all thine art? Three-Leaves, instruct me! I am sick of price. Framed in the arching of two clover-stems Where-through I gaze from off my hill, afar, The spacious fields from me to Heaven take on Tremors of change and new significance To th' eye, as to the ear a simple tale Begins to hint a parable's sense beneath. The prospect widens, cuts all bounds of blue Where horizontal limits bend, and spreads Into a curious-hill'd and curious-valley'd Vast, Endless before, behind, around; which seems Th' incalculable Up-and-Down of Time Made plain before mine eyes. The clover-stems Still cover all the space; but now they bear, For clover-blooms, fair, stately heads of men With poets' faces heartsome, dear and pale -- Sweet visages of all the souls of time Whose loving service to the world has been In the artist's way expressed and bodied. Oh, In arms' reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha (sweetest masters! Let me lay These arms this once, this humble once, about Your reverend necks -- the most containing clasp, For all in all, this world e'er saw!) and there, Yet further on, bright throngs unnamable Of workers worshipful, nobilities In the Court of Gentle Service, silent men, Dwellers in woods, brooders on helpful art, And all the press of them, the fair, the large, That wrought with beauty. Lo, what bulk is here? Now comes the Course-of-things, shaped like an Ox, Slow browsing, o'er my hillside, ponderously -- The huge-brawned, tame, and workful Course-of-things, That hath his grass, if earth be round or flat, And hath his grass, if empires plunge in pain Or faiths flash out. This cool, unasking Ox Comes browsing o'er my hills and vales of Time, And thrusts me out his tongue, and curls it, sharp, And sicklewise, about my poets' heads, And twists them in, all -- Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha, in one sheaf -- and champs and chews, With slantly-churning jaws, and swallows down; Then slowly plants a mighty forefoot out, And makes advance to futureward, one inch. So: they have played their part. And to this end? This, God? This, troublous-breeding Earth? This, Sun Of hot, quick pains? To this no-end that ends, These Masters wrought, and wept, and sweated blood, And burned, and loved, and ached with public shame, And found no friends to breathe their loves to, save Woods and wet pillows? This was all? This Ox? "Nay," quoth a sum of voices in mine ear, "God's clover, we, and feed His Course-of-things; The pasture is God's pasture; systems strange Of food and fiberment He hath, whereby The general brawn is built for plans of His To quality precise. Kinsman, learn this: The artist's market is the heart of man; The artist's price, some little good of man. Tease not thy vision with vain search for ends. The End of Means is art that works by love. The End of Ends . . . in God's Beginning's lost."

Written by Siegfried Sassoon | Dead Musicians I From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, The substance of my dreams took fire. You built cathedrals in my heart, And lit my pinnacled desire. You were the ardour and the bright Procession of my thoughts toward prayer. You were the wrath of storm, the light On distant citadels aflare. II Great names, I cannot find you now In these loud years of youth that strives Through doom toward peace: upon my brow I wear a wreath of banished lives. You have no part with lads who fought And laughed and suffered at my side. Your fugues and symphonies have brought No memory of my friends who died. III For when my brain is on their track, In slangy speech I call them back. With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm. ‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’ I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time; And see their faces crowding round To the sound of the syncopated beat. They’ve got such jolly things to tell, Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat... . . . . And so the song breaks off; and I’m alone. They’re dead ... For God’s sake stop that gramophone.

Written by James Lee Jobe | Moon In Virgo You are not beaten. The simple music rises up, children's voices in the air, sound floating out across the land and on to the river beyond, over the valley's floor. No, you cannot go back for those things you lost, the parts of yourself that were taken, often by force. Like an animal in the forest you must weep it all away at once, violently, and then simply live on. The music here is Bach, Vivaldi; a chorale of children, a piano, a violin. Together, they have a certain spirit that is light, that lets in light, joyful, ecstatic. "Forgive," said The Christ, and why not? Every day that you still breathe has all the joy and murderous possibilities of your bravest dream. Forgive. Breathe. Live. The moon has entered Virgo, the wind shifts, blows up from the Delta, cools this valley, and you are not beaten; the children sing, it is Bach, and you are brave, alive, and human.

Written by Badger Clark | Bachin' Our lives are hid; our trails are strange; We're scattered through the West In canyon cool, on blistered range Or windy mountain crest. Wherever Nature drops her ears And bares her claws to scratch, From Yuma to the north frontiers, You'll likely find the bach', You will, The shy and sober bach'! Our days are sun and storm and mist, The same as any life, Except that in our trouble list We never count a wife. Each has a reason why he's lone, But keeps it 'neath his hat; Or, if he's got to tell some one, Confides it to his cat, He does, Just tells it to his cat. We're young or old or slow or fast, But all plumb versatyle. The mighty bach' that fires the blast Kin serve up beans in style. The bach' that ropes the plungin' cows Kin mix the biscuits true-- We earn our grub by drippin' brows And cook it by 'em too, We do, We cook it by 'em too. We like to breathe unbranded air, Be free of foot and mind, And go or stay, or sing or swear, Whichever we're inclined. An appetite, a conscience clear, A pipe that's rich and old Are loves that always bless and cheer And never cry nor scold, They don't. They never cry nor scold. Old Adam bached some ages back And smoked his pipe so free, A-loafin' in a palm-leaf shack Beneath a mango tree. He'd best have stuck to bachin' ways, And scripture proves the same, For Adam's only happy days Was 'fore the woman came, They was, All 'fore the woman came.