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Best Famous Catalogue Poems

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

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Written by John Drinkwater | Create an image from this poem

Persuasion

Persuasion

I 	At any moment love unheralded
Comes, and is king.
Then as, with a fall Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread Are withered in untimely burial, So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by, And as a beggar walks unfriended ways, With but remembered beauty to defy The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.
Or in that later travelling he comes Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs Are all now that love was, and blindly spells His royal state of old a glory cursed, Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.
II If we should part upon that one embrace, And set our courses ever, each from each, With all our treasure but a fading face And little ghostly syllables of speech; Should beauty's moment never be renewed, And moons on moons look out for us in vain, And each but whisper from a solitude To hear but echoes of a lonely pain, — Still in a world that fortune cannot change Should walk those two that once were you and I, Those two that once when moon and stars were strange Poets above us in an April sky, Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea, Mute, and for ever, but for you and me.
III This nature, this great flood of life, this cheat That uses us as baubles for her coat, Takes love, that should be nothing but the beat Of blood for its own beauty, by the throat, Saying, you are my servant and shall do My purposes, or utter bitterness Shall be your wage, and nothing come to you But stammering tongues that never can confess.
Undaunted then in answer here I cry, 'You wanton, that control the hand of him Who masquerades as wisdom in a sky Where holy, holy, sing the cherubim, I will not pay one penny to your name Though all my body crumble into shame.
' IV Woman, I once had whimpered at your hand, Saying that all the wisdom that I sought Lay in your brain, that you were as the sand Should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought; I should have read in you the character Of oracles that quick a thousand lays, Looked in your eyes, and seen accounted there Solomons legioned for bewildered praise.
Now have I learnt love as love is.
I take Your hand, and with no inquisition learn All that your eyes can tell, and that's to make A little reckoning and brief, then turn Away, and in my heart I hear a call, 'I love, I love, I love'; and that is all.
V When all the hungry pain of love I bear, And in poor lightless thought but burn and burn, And wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere, Yet can no word of revelation learn; When endlessly the scales of yea and nay In dreadful motion fall and rise and fall, When all my heart in sorrow I could pay Until at last were left no tear at all; Then if with tame or subtle argument Companions come and draw me to a place Where words are but the tappings of content, And life spreads all her garments with a grace, I curse that ease, and hunger in my heart Back to my pain and lonely to depart.
VI Not anything you do can make you mine, For enterprise with equal charity In duty as in love elect will shine, The constant slave of mutability.
Nor can your words for all their honey breath Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme, And though my ear deliver them from death One day or two, it is so little time.
Nor does your beauty in its excellence Excel a thousand in the daily sun, Yet must I put a period to pretence, And with my logic's catalogue have done, For act and word and beauty are but keys To unlock the heart, and you, dear love, are these.
VII Never the heart of spring had trembled so As on that day when first in Paradise We went afoot as novices to know For the first time what blue was in the skies, What fresher green than any in the grass, And how the sap goes beating to the sun, And tell how on the clocks of beauty pass Minute by minute till the last is done.
But not the new birds singing in the brake, And not the buds of our discovery, The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache For beauty that we shadow as we see, Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings, Took these, and made them Paradisal things.
VIII The lilacs offer beauty to the sun, Throbbing with wonder as eternally For sad and happy lovers they have done With the first bloom of summer in the sky; Yet they are newly spread in honour now, Because, for every beam of beauty given Out of that clustering heart, back to the bough My love goes beating, from a greater heaven.
So be my love for good or sorry luck Bound, it has virtue on this April eve That shall be there for ever when they pluck Lilacs for love.
And though I come to grieve Long at a frosty tomb, there still shall be My happy lyric in the lilac tree.
IX When they make silly question of my love, And speak to me of danger and disdain, And look by fond old argument to move My wisdom to docility again; When to my prouder heart they set the pride Of custom and the gossip of the street, And show me figures of myself beside A self diminished at their judgment seat; Then do I sit as in a drowsy pew To hear a priest expounding th' heavenly will, Defiling wonder that he never knew With stolen words of measured good and ill; For to the love that knows their counselling, Out of my love contempt alone I bring.
X Not love of you is most that I can bring, Since what I am to love you is the test, And should I love you more than any thing You would but be of idle love possessed, A mere love wandering in appetite, Counting your glories and yet bringing none, Finding in you occasions of delight, A thief of payment for no service done.
But when of labouring life I make a song And bring it you, as that were my reward, To let what most is me to you belong, Then do I come of high possessions lord, And loving life more than my love of you I give you love more excellently true.
XI What better tale could any lover tell When age or death his reckoning shall write Than thus, 'Love taught me only to rebel Against these things, — the thieving of delight Without return; the gospellers of fear Who, loving, yet deny the truth they bear, Sad-suited lusts with lecherous hands to smear The cloth of gold they would but dare not wear.
And love gave me great knowledge of the trees, And singing birds, and earth with all her flowers; Wisdom I knew and righteousness in these, I lived in their atonement all my hours; Love taught me how to beauty's eye alone The secret of the lying heart is known.
' XII This then at last; we may be wiser far Than love, and put his folly to our measure, Yet shall we learn, poor wizards that we are, That love chimes not nor motions at our pleasure.
We bid him come, and light an eager fire, And he goes down the road without debating; We cast him from the house of our desire, And when at last we leave he will be waiting.
And in the end there is no folly but this, To counsel love out of our little learning.
For still he knows where rotten timber is, And where the boughs for the long winter burning; And when life needs no more of us at all, Love's word will be the last that we recall.


Written by Sidney Lanier | Create an image from this poem

The Crystal

 At midnight, death's and truth's unlocking time,
When far within the spirit's hearing rolls
The great soft rumble of the course of things --
A bulk of silence in a mask of sound, --
When darkness clears our vision that by day
Is sun-blind, and the soul's a ravening owl
For truth and flitteth here and there about
Low-lying woody tracts of time and oft
Is minded for to sit upon a bough,
Dry-dead and sharp, of some long-stricken tree
And muse in that gaunt place, -- 'twas then my heart,
Deep in the meditative dark, cried out:

"Ye companies of governor-spirits grave,
Bards, and old bringers-down of flaming news
From steep-wall'd heavens, holy malcontents,
Sweet seers, and stellar visionaries, all
That brood about the skies of poesy,
Full bright ye shine, insuperable stars;
Yet, if a man look hard upon you, none
With total lustre blazeth, no, not one
But hath some heinous freckle of the flesh
Upon his shining cheek, not one but winks
His ray, opaqued with intermittent mist
Of defect; yea, you masters all must ask
Some sweet forgiveness, which we leap to give,
We lovers of you, heavenly-glad to meet
Your largesse so with love, and interplight
Your geniuses with our mortalities.
Thus unto thee, O sweetest Shakespeare sole, A hundred hurts a day I do forgive ('Tis little, but, enchantment! 'tis for thee): Small curious quibble; Juliet's prurient pun In the poor, pale face of Romeo's fancied death; Cold rant of Richard; Henry's fustian roar Which frights away that sleep he invocates; Wronged Valentine's unnatural haste to yield; Too-silly shifts of maids that mask as men In faint disguises that could ne'er disguise -- Viola, Julia, Portia, Rosalind; Fatigues most drear, and needless overtax Of speech obscure that had as lief be plain; Last I forgive (with more delight, because 'Tis more to do) the labored-lewd discourse That e'en thy young invention's youngest heir Besmirched the world with.
Father Homer, thee, Thee also I forgive thy sandy wastes Of prose and catalogue, thy drear harangues That tease the patience of the centuries, Thy sleazy scrap of story, -- but a rogue's Rape of a light-o'-love, -- too soiled a patch To broider with the gods.
Thee, Socrates, Thou dear and very strong one, I forgive Thy year-worn cloak, thine iron stringencies That were but dandy upside-down, thy words Of truth that, mildlier spoke, had mainlier wrought.
So, Buddha, beautiful! I pardon thee That all the All thou hadst for needy man Was Nothing, and thy Best of being was But not to be.
Worn Dante, I forgive The implacable hates that in thy horrid hells Or burn or freeze thy fellows, never loosed By death, nor time, nor love.
And I forgive Thee, Milton, those thy comic-dreadful wars Where, armed with gross and inconclusive steel, Immortals smite immortals mortalwise And fill all heaven with folly.
Also thee, Brave Aeschylus, thee I forgive, for that Thine eye, by bare bright justice basilisked, Turned not, nor ever learned to look where Love Stands shining.
So, unto thee, Lucretius mine (For oh, what heart hath loved thee like to this That's now complaining?), freely I forgive Thy logic poor, thine error rich, thine earth Whose graves eat souls and all.
Yea, all you hearts Of beauty, and sweet righteous lovers large: Aurelius fine, oft superfine; mild Saint A Kempis, overmild; Epictetus, Whiles low in thought, still with old slavery tinct; Rapt Behmen, rapt too far; high Swedenborg, O'ertoppling; Langley, that with but a touch Of art hadst sung Piers Plowman to the top Of English songs, whereof 'tis dearest, now, And most adorable; Caedmon, in the morn A-calling angels with the cow-herd's call That late brought up the cattle; Emerson, Most wise, that yet, in finding Wisdom, lost Thy Self, sometimes; tense Keats, with angels' nerves Where men's were better; Tennyson, largest voice Since Milton, yet some register of wit Wanting; -- all, all, I pardon, ere 'tis asked, Your more or less, your little mole that marks You brother and your kinship seals to man.
But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, -- What `if' or `yet', what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's, -- Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ?"
Written by David Lehman | Create an image from this poem

Shake The Superflux!

 I like walking on streets as black and wet as this one
now, at two in the solemnly musical morning, when everyone else
in this town emptied of Lestrygonians and Lotus-eaters
is asleep or trying or worrying why
they aren't asleep, while unknown to them Ulysses walks
into the shabby apartment I live in, humming and feeling
happy with the avant-garde weather we're having,
the winds (a fugue for flute and oboe) pouring
into the windows which I left open although
I live on the ground floor and there have been
two burglaries on my block already this week,
do I quickly take a look to see
if the valuables are missing? No, that is I can't,
it's an epistemological quandary: what I consider
valuable, would they? Who are they, anyway? I'd answer that
with speculations based on newspaper accounts if I were
Donald E.
Westlake, whose novels I'm hooked on, but this first cigarette after twenty-four hours of abstinence tastes so good it makes me want to include it in my catalogue of pleasures designed to hide the ugliness or sweep it away the way the violent overflow of rain over cliffs cleans the sewers and drains of Ithaca whose waterfalls head my list, followed by crudites of carrots and beets, roots and all, with rained-on radishes, too beautiful to eat, and the pure pleasure of talking, talking and not knowing where the talk will lead, but willing to take my chances.
Furthermore I shall enumerate some varieties of tulips (Bacchus, Tantalus, Dardanelles) and other flowers with names that have a life of their own (Love Lies Bleeding, Dwarf Blue Bedding, Burning Bush, Torch Lily, Narcissus).
Mostly, as I've implied, it's the names of things that count; still, sometimes I wonder and, wondering, find the path of least resistance, the earth's orbit around the sun's delirious clarity.
Once you sniff the aphrodisiac of disaster, you know: there's no reason for the anxiety--or for expecting to be free of it; try telling Franz Kafka he has no reason to feel guilty; or so I say to well-meaning mongers of common sense.
They way I figure, you start with the names which are keys and then you throw them away and learn to love the locked rooms, with or without corpses inside, riddles to unravel, emptiness to possess, a woman to wake up with a kiss (who is she? no one knows) who begs your forgiveness (for what? you cannot know) and then, in the authoritative tone of one who has weathered the storm of his exile, orders you to put up your hands and beg the rain to continue as if it were in your power.
And it is, I feel it with each drop.
I am standing outside at the window, looking in on myself writing these words, feeling what wretches feel, just as the doctor ordered.
And that's what I plan to do, what the storm I was caught in reminded me to do, to shake the superflux, distribute my appetite, fast without so much as a glass of water, and love each bite I haven't taken.
I shall become the romantic poet whose coat of many colors smeared with blood, like a butcher's apron, left in the sacred pit or brought back to my father to confirm my death, confirms my new life instead, an alien prince of dungeons and dreams who sheds the disguise people recognize him by to reveal himself to his true brothers at last in the silence that stuns before joy descends, like rain.
Written by Ezra Pound | Create an image from this poem

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I)

 "Vocat aestus in umbram" 
Nemesianus Es.
IV.
E.
P.
Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime" In the old sense.
Wrong from the start -- No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait: "Idmen gar toi panth, os eni Troie Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles; Observed the elegance of Circe's hair Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by "the march of events", He passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme De son eage; the case presents No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.
II.
The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace; Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
III.
The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos, The pianola "replaces" Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus, Phallic and ambrosial Made way for macerations; Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness Shall reign throughout our days.
Even the Christian beauty Defects -- after Samothrace; We see to kalon Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us, Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer; Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus, We choose a knave or an eunuch To rule over us.
A bright Apollo, tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon, What god, man, or hero Shall I place a tin wreath upon? IV.
These fought, in any case, and some believing, pro domo, in any case .
.
Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later .
.
.
some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor" .
.
walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood, Fair cheeks, and fine bodies; fortitude as never before frankness as never before, disillusions as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies.
V.
There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old ***** gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.
Yeux Glauques Gladstone was still respected, When John Ruskin produced "Kings Treasuries"; Swinburne And Rossetti still abused.
Fœtid Buchanan lifted up his voice When that faun's head of hers Became a pastime for Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartons Have preserved her eyes; Still, at the Tate, they teach Cophetua to rhapsodize; Thin like brook-water, With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat was still-born In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face, Questing and passive .
.
.
.
"Ah, poor Jenny's case" .
.
.
Bewildered that a world Shows no surprise At her last maquero's Adulteries.
"Siena Mi Fe', Disfecemi Maremma" Among the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones, Engaged in perfecting the catalogue, I found the last scion of the Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub .
.
.
But showed no trace of alcohol At the autopsy, privately performed -- Tissue preserved -- the pure mind Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels; Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
So spoke the author of "The Dorian Mood", M.
Verog, out of step with the decade, Detached from his contemporaries, Neglected by the young, Because of these reveries.
Brennbaum.
The sky-like limpid eyes, The circular infant's face, The stiffness from spats to collar Never relaxing into grace; The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years, Showed only when the daylight fell Level across the face Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable".
Mr.
Nixon In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht Mr.
Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer Dangers of delay.
"Consider Carefully the reviewer.
"I was as poor as you are; "When I began I got, of course, "Advance on royalties, fifty at first", said Mr.
Nixon, "Follow me, and take a column, "Even if you have to work free.
"Butter reviewers.
From fifty to three hundred "I rose in eighteen months; "The hardest nut I had to crack "Was Dr.
Dundas.
"I never mentioned a man but with the view "Of selling my own works.
"The tip's a good one, as for literature "It gives no man a sinecure.
" And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
" * * * Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me: Don't kick against the pricks, Accept opinion.
The "Nineties" tried your game And died, there's nothing in it.
X.
Beneath the sagging roof The stylist has taken shelter, Unpaid, uncelebrated, At last from the world's welter Nature receives him, With a placid and uneducated mistress He exercises his talents And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions Leaks through its thatch; He offers succulent cooking; The door has a creaking latch.
XI.
"Conservatrix of Milésien" Habits of mind and feeling, Possibly.
But in Ealing With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen? No, "Milésian" is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her Older than those her grandmother Told her would fit her station.
XII.
"Daphne with her thighs in bark Stretches toward me her leafy hands", -- Subjectively.
In the stuffed-satin drawing-room I await The Lady Valentine's commands, Knowing my coat has never been Of precisely the fashion To stimulate, in her, A durable passion; Doubtful, somewhat, of the value Of well-gowned approbation Of literary effort, But never of The Lady Valentine's vocation: Poetry, her border of ideas, The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending With other strata Where the lower and higher have ending; A hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention, A modulation toward the theatre, Also, in the case of revolution, A possible friend and comforter.
* * * Conduct, on the other hand, the soul "Which the highest cultures have nourished" To Fleet St.
where Dr.
Johnson flourished; Beside this thoroughfare The sale of half-hose has Long since superseded the cultivation Of Pierian roses.
Written by James Joyce | Create an image from this poem

The Ballad of Persse OReilly

 Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall,
 (Chorus) Of the Magazine Wall,
 Hump, helmet and all?

He was one time our King of the Castle
Now he's kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.
And from Green street he'll be sent by order of His Worship To the penal jail of Mountjoy (Chorus) To the jail of Mountjoy! Jail him and joy.
He was fafafather of all schemes for to bother us Slow coaches and immaculate contraceptives for the populace, Mare's milk for the sick, seven dry Sundays a week, Openair love and religion's reform, (Chorus) And religious reform, Hideous in form.
Arrah, why, says you, couldn't he manage it? I'll go bail, my fine dairyman darling, Like the bumping bull of the Cassidys All your butter is in your horns.
(Chorus) His butter is in his horns.
Butter his horns! (Repeat) Hurrah there, Hosty, frosty Hosty, change that shirt on ye, Rhyme the rann, the king of all ranns! Balbaccio, balbuccio! We had chaw chaw chops, chairs, chewing gum, the chicken-pox and china chambers Universally provided by this soffsoaping salesman.
Small wonder He'll Cheat E'erawan our local lads nicknamed him.
When Chimpden first took the floor (Chorus) With his bucketshop store Down Bargainweg, Lower.
So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery And 'tis short till sheriff Clancy'll be winding up his unlimited company With the bailiff's bom at the door, (Chorus) Bimbam at the door.
Then he'll bum no more.
Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island The hooker of that hammerfast viking And Gall's curse on the day when Eblana bay Saw his black and tan man-o'-war.
(Chorus) Saw his man-o'-war On the harbour bar.
Where from? roars Poolbeg.
Cookingha'pence, he bawls Donnez-moi scampitle, wick an wipin'fampiny Fingal Mac Oscar Onesine Bargearse Boniface Thok's min gammelhole Norveegickers moniker Og as ay are at gammelhore Norveegickers cod.
(Chorus) A Norwegian camel old cod.
He is, begod.
Lift it, Hosty, lift it, ye devil, ye! up with the rann, the rhyming rann! It was during some fresh water garden pumping Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the monkeys That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey Made bold a maid to woo (Chorus) Woohoo, what'll she doo! The general lost her maidenloo! He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher, For to go and shove himself that way on top of her.
Begob, he's the crux of the catalogue Of our antediluvial zoo, (Chorus) Messrs Billing and Coo.
Noah's larks, good as noo.
He was joulting by Wellinton's monument Our rotorious hippopopotamuns When some bugger let down the backtrap of the omnibus And he caught his death of fusiliers, (Chorus) With his rent in his rears.
Give him six years.
'Tis sore pity for his innocent poor children But look out for his missus legitimate! When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker Won't there be earwigs on the green? (Chorus) Big earwigs on the green, The largest ever you seen.
Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses! Then we'll have a free trade Gael's band and mass meeting For to sod him the brave son of Scandiknavery.
And we'll bury him down in Oxmanstown Along with the devil and the Danes, (Chorus) With the deaf and dumb Danes, And all their remains.
And not all the king's men nor his horses Will resurrect his corpus For there's no true spell in Connacht or hell (bis) That's able to raise a Cain.


Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

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 William Carlos (WCW) Williams | Create an image from this poem

from Asphodel That Greeny Flower

 Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
 like a buttercup
 upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
 I come, my sweet,
 to sing to you.
We lived long together a life filled, if you will, with flowers.
So that I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell.
Today I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers that we both loved, even to this poor colorless thing- I saw it when I was a child- little prized among the living but the dead see, asking among themselves: What do I remember that was shaped as this thing is shaped? while our eyes fill with tears.
Of love, abiding love it will be telling though too weak a wash of crimson colors it to make it wholly credible.
There is something something urgent I have to say to you and you alone but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time.
And so with fear in my heart I drag it out and keep on talking for I dare not stop.
Listen while I talk on against time.
It will not be for long.
I have forgot and yet I see clearly enough something central to the sky which ranges round it.
An odor springs from it! A sweetest odor! Honeysuckle! And now there comes the buzzing of a bee! and a whole flood of sister memories! Only give me time, time to recall them before I shall speak out.
Give me time, time.
When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection.
The asphodel, forebodingly, among them.
I bring you, reawakened, a memory of those flowers.
They were sweet when I pressed them and retained something of their sweetness a long time.
It is a curious odor, a moral odor, that brings me near to you.
The color was the first to go.
There had come to me a challenge, your dear self, mortal as I was, the lily's throat to the hummingbird! Endless wealth, I thought, held out its arms to me.
A thousand tropics in an apple blossom.
The generous earth itself gave us lief.
The whole world became my garden! But the sea which no one tends is also a garden when the sun strikes it and the waves are wakened.
I have seen it and so have you when it puts all flowers to shame.
Too, there are the starfish stiffened by the sun and other sea wrack and weeds.
We knew that along with the rest of it for we were born by the sea, knew its rose hedges to the very water's brink.
There the pink mallow grows and in their season strawberries and there, later, we went to gather the wild plum.
I cannot say that I have gone to hell for your love but often found myself there in your pursuit.
I do not like it and wanted to be in heaven.
Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life from books and out of them about love.
Death is not the end of it.
There is a hierarchy which can be attained, I think, in its service.
Its guerdon is a fairy flower; a cat of twenty lives.
If no one came to try it the world would be the loser.
It has been for you and me as one who watches a storm come in over the water.
We have stood from year to year before the spectacle of our lives with joined hands.
The storm unfolds.
Lightning plays about the edges of the clouds.
The sky to the north is placid, blue in the afterglow as the storm piles up.
It is a flower that will soon reach the apex of its bloom.
We danced, in our minds, and read a book together.
You remember? It was a serious book.
And so books entered our lives.
The sea! The sea! Always when I think of the sea there comes to mind the Iliad and Helen's public fault that bred it.
Were it not for that there would have been no poem but the world if we had remembered, those crimson petals spilled among the stones, would have called it simply murder.
The sexual orchid that bloomed then sending so many disinterested men to their graves has left its memory to a race of fools or heroes if silence is a virtue.
The sea alone with its multiplicity holds any hope.
The storm has proven abortive but we remain after the thoughts it roused to re-cement our lives.
It is the mind the mind that must be cured short of death's intervention, and the will becomes again a garden.
The poem is complex and the place made in our lives for the poem.
Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence.
Begin again.
It is like Homer's catalogue of ships: it fills up the time.
I speak in figures, well enough, the dresses you wear are figures also, we could not meet otherwise.
When I speak of flowers it is to recall that at one time we were young.
All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
My sweet, you have it also, therefore I love you and could not love you otherwise.
Imagine you saw a field made up of women all silver-white.
What should you do but love them? The storm bursts or fades! it is not the end of the world.
Love is something else, or so I thought it, a garden which expands, though I knew you as a woman and never thought otherwise, until the whole sea has been taken up and all its gardens.
It was the love of love, the love that swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of nature, of people, of animals, a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you.
I should have known, though I did not, that the lily-of-the-valley is a flower makes many ill who whiff it.
We had our children, rivals in the general onslaught.
I put them aside though I cared for them.
as well as any man could care for his children according to my lights.
You understand I had to meet you after the event and have still to meet you.
Love to which you too shall bow along with me- a flower a weakest flower shall be our trust and not because we are too feeble to do otherwise but because at the height of my power I risked what I had to do, therefore to prove that we love each other while my very bones sweated that I could not cry to you in the act.
Of asphodel, that greeny flower, I come, my sweet, to sing to you! My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men.
Look at what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in despised poems.
It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
Hear me out for I too am concerned and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides.
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Elegy In The Classroom

 In the thin classroom, where your face
was noble and your words were all things,
I find this boily creature in your place;

find you disarranged, squatting on the window sill,
irrefutably placed up there,
like a hunk of some big frog
watching us through the V
of your woolen legs.
Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.
We fidget in our plain chairs and pretend to catalogue our facts for your burly sorcery or ignore your fat blind eyes or the prince you ate yesterday who was wise, wise, wise.
Written by Howard Nemerov | Create an image from this poem

Learning the Trees

 Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn
The language of the trees.
That's done indoors, Out of a book, which now you think of it Is one of the transformations of a tree.
The words themselves are a delight to learn, You might be in a foreign land of terms Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome, Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth.
But best of all are the words that shape the leaves – Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform – And their venation – palmate and parallel – And tips – acute, truncate, auriculate.
Sufficiently provided, you may now Go forth to the forests and the shady streets To see how the chaos of experience Answers to catalogue and category.
Confusedly.
The leaves of a single tree May differ among themselves more than they do From other species, so you have to find, All blandly says the book, "an average leaf.
" Example, the catalpa in the book Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three Around the stem; the one in front of you But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost; Maybe it's not catalpa? Dreadful doubt.
It may be weeks before you see an elm Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids, A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape.
Still, pedetemtim as Lucretious says, Little by little, you do start to learn; And learn as well, maybe, what language does And how it does it, cutting across the world Not always at the joints, competing with Experience while cooperating with Experience, and keeping an obstinate Intransigence, uncanny, of its own.
Think finally about the secret will Pretending obedience to Nature, but Invidiously distinguishing everywhere, Dividing up the world to conquer it.
And think also how funny knowledge is: You may succeed in learning many trees And calling off their names as you go by, But their comprehensive silence stays the same.
Written by Russell Edson | Create an image from this poem

The Theory

 The big one went to sleep as to die and dreamed he
became a tiny one.
So tiny as to have lost all substance.
To have become as theoretical as a point.
Then someone said, get up, big one, you're not doing yourself any good.
You puddle and stagnate in your weight.
Best to be up and toward.
It irrigates you.
What, said the big one, have I not disappeared? Have you not mistaken a cloud for me? Perhaps some local hill fulfills your expectation? No, it's no mistake, it's you; those interconnecting puddles of flesh pulling at your bones, attempting that world-weary fall toward the great waters of the world.
How you manage against gravity is one of the greater triumphs of nature.
Do you think, said the big one, there's a woman who would like to marry me? Yes, had such a woman done everything in the world except marry you, she might think it worthy before dying to complete her catalogue.
Or having done everything, go meekly without decision or care to such a consummation.
Then you really feel, said the big one, that this woman could come to care very deeply for me? All is theoretical.
Who knows enough to say the outcome of any event, save that it was past us, and we saw the back of it moving slowly into the Universe, seeking other settings to repeat the fall of fate.
.
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That sounds wonderful, that a woman like that could be in love with me, said the big one.
But in a few moments the big one was back asleep, dreaming that he had come to such enlargement that he constituted all the matter in the Universe, which must include the earth and the woman he would have loved.
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Book: Reflection on the Important Things