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Best Famous Contract Poems

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

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Written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti | Create an image from this poem

Bird With Two Right Wings

 And now our government
a bird with two right wings
flies on from zone to zone
while we go on having our little fun & games
at each election
as if it really mattered who the pilot is
of Air Force One
(They're interchangeable, stupid!)
While this bird with two right wings
flies right on with its corporate flight crew
And this year its the Great Movie Cowboy in the cockpit
And next year its the great Bush pilot
And now its the Chameleon Kid
and he keeps changing the logo on his captains cap
and now its a donkey and now an elephant
and now some kind of donkephant
And now we recognize two of the crew
who took out a contract on America
and one is a certain gringo wretch
who's busy monkeywrenching
crucial parts of the engine
and its life-support systems
and they got a big fat hose
to siphon off the fuel to privatized tanks
And all the while we just sit there
in the passenger seats
without parachutes
listening to all the news that's fit to air
over the one-way PA system
about how the contract on America
is really good for us etcetera
As all the while the plane lumbers on
into its postmodern
manifest destiny


Written by Robinson Jeffers | Create an image from this poem

The Great Explosion

 The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
 dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
 harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no
 way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each 
 other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae 
 like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
 No wonder we are so fascinated with 
 fireworks
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
 the howling fireblast that we were born from.

But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will 
 gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the 
 whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back 
 and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His 
 terrible life.
 He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty.
 We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's
 Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care
 and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the
 tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to
 meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not
 --of faceless violence, the root of all things.
Written by Sylvia Plath | Create an image from this poem

April 18

 the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you

or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these

and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops

a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight
Written by Les Murray | Create an image from this poem

Travels With John Hunter

 We who travel between worlds 
lose our muscle and bone. 
I was wheeling a barrow of earth 
when agony bayoneted me. 

I could not sit, or lie down, 
or stand, in Casualty. 
Stomach-calming clay caked my lips, 
I turned yellow as the moon 

and slid inside a CAT-scan wheel 
in a hospital where I met no one 
so much was my liver now my dire 
preoccupation. I was sped down a road. 

of treetops and fishing-rod lightpoles 
towards the three persons of God 
and the three persons of John Hunter 
Hospital. Who said We might lose this one. 

Twenty days or to the heat-death 
of the Universe have the same duration: 
vaguely half a hour. I awoke 
giggling over a joke 

about Paul Kruger in Johannesburg 
and missed the white court stockings 
I half remembered from my prone 
still voyage beyond flesh and bone. 

I asked my friend who got new lungs 
How long were you crazy, coming back? 
Five days, he said. Violent and mad. 
Fictive Afrikaner police were at him, 

not unworldly Oom Paul Kruger. 
Valerie, who had sat the twenty days 
beside me, now gently told me tales 
of my time-warp. The operative canyon 

stretched, stapled, with dry roseate walls 
down my belly. Seaweed gel 
plugged views of my pluck and offal. 
The only poet whose liver 

damage hadn't been self-inflicted, 
grinned my agent. A momentarily 
holed bowel had released flora 
who live in us and will eat us 

when we stop feeding them the earth. 
I had, it did seem, rehearsed 
the private office of the grave, 
ceased excreting, made corpse gases 

all while liana'd in tubes 
and overseen by cockpit instruments 
that beeped or struck up Beethoven's 
Fifth at behests of fluid. 

I also hear when I lay lipless 
and far away I was anointed 
first by a mild metaphoric church 
then by the Church of no metaphors. 

Now I said, signing a Dutch contract 
in a hand I couldn't recognise, 
let's go and eat Chinese soup 
and drive to Lake Macquarie. Was I 

not renewed as we are in Heaven? 
In fact I could hardly endure 
Earth gravity, and stayed weak and cranky 
till the soup came, squid and vegetables, 

pure Yang. And was sane thereafter. 
It seemed I'd also travelled 
in a Spring-in-Winter love-barque of cards, 
of flowers and phone calls and letters, 

concern I'd never dreamed was there 
when black kelp boiled in my head. 
I'd awoken amid my State funeral, 
nevermore to eat my liver 

or feed it to the Black Dog, depression 
which the three Johns Hunter seem 
to have killed with their scalpels: 
it hasn't found its way home, 

where I now dodder and mend 
in thanks for devotion, for the ambulance 
this time, for the hospital fork lift, 
for pethidine, and this face of deity: 

not the foreknowledge of death 
but the project of seeing conscious life 
rescued from death defines and will 
atone for the human.
Written by Philip Larkin | Create an image from this poem

Lines On A Young Ladys Photograph Album

 At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose --
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat

(Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways) --
From every side you strike at my control,
Not least through those these disquieting chaps who loll
At ease about your earlier days:
Not quite your class, I'd say, dear, on the whole.

But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards,

But shows a cat as disinclined, and shades
A chin as doubled when it is, what grace
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly persuades
That this is a real girl in a real place,

In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry
Not only at exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was
Won't call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across

The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you'd spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.


Written by Robert William Service | Create an image from this poem

The Ballad Of Blasphemous Bill

 I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie,
Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die--
Whether he die in the light o' day or under the peak-faced moon;
In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, mucklucks or patent shoon;
On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or draw;
In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw;
By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead--
I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead.

For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his mind was mighty sot
On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized bone-yard lot.
And where he died or how he died, it didn't matter a damn
So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone "epigram".
So I promised him, and he paid the price in good cheechako coin
(Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin).
Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine: "Here lies poor Bill MacKie",
And I hung it up on my cabin wall and I waited for Bill to die.

Years passed away, and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange,
Of a long-deserted line of traps 'way back of the Bighorn range;
Of a little hut by the great divide, and a white man stiff and still,
Lying there by his lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill.
So I thought of the contract I'd made with him, and I took down from the shelf
The swell black box with the silver plate he'd picked out for hisself;
And I packed it full of grub and "hooch", and I slung it on the sleigh;
Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day.

You know what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below;
When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow;
When the pine-trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood,
And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood;
When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit,
And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit;
When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill--
Well, it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill.

Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand,
As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land;
Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heart-breaking woes,
And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows!
North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain
Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again.

River and plain and mighty peak--and who could stand unawed?
As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God.
North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes,
And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes,
Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill,
And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill.

Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;
Sparkling ice on the dead man's chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;
Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.
I gazed at the coffin I'd brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
And at last I spoke: "Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies."

Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,
With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can't control?
Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,
And that seems to say: "You may try all day, but you'll never jam me in"?
I'm not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue
As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do.
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about,
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.

Well, I thawed and thawed for thirteen days, but it didn't seem no good;
His arms and legs stuck out like pegs, as if they was made of wood.
Till at last I said: "It ain't no use--he's froze too hard to thaw;
He's obstinate, and he won't lie straight, so I guess I got to--saw."
So I sawed off poor Bill's arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight
In the little coffin he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate;
And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down;
Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh, and I started back to town.

So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep,
And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up, when the Judgment sluice-heads sweep;
And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun,
And sometimes I wonder if they was, the awful things I done.
And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding of the Law,
I often think of poor old Bill--and how hard he was to saw.
Written by Friedrich von Schiller | Create an image from this poem

The Conflict

 No! I this conflict longer will not wage,
The conflict duty claims--the giant task;--
Thy spells, O virtue, never can assuage
The heart's wild fire--this offering do not ask

True, I have sworn--a solemn vow have sworn,
That I myself will curb the self within;
Yet take thy wreath, no more it shall be worn--
Take back thy wreath, and leave me free to sin.

Rent be the contract I with thee once made;--
She loves me, loves me--forfeit be the crown!
Blessed he who, lulled in rapture's dreamy shade,
Glides, as I glide, the deep fall gladly down.

She sees the worm that my youth's bloom decays,
She sees my spring-time wasted as it flees;
And, marvelling at the rigor that gainsays
The heart's sweet impulse, my reward decrees.

Distrust this angel purity, fair soul!
It is to guilt thy pity armeth me;
Could being lavish its unmeasured whole,
It ne'er could give a gift to rival thee!

Thee--the dear guilt I ever seek to shun,
O tyranny of fate, O wild desires!
My virtue's only crown can but be won
In that last breath--when virtue's self expires!
Written by Robert Browning | Create an image from this poem

Pan and Luna

 Si credere dignum est.--Virgil, Georgics, III, 390


Oh, worthy of belief I hold it was, 
Virgil, your legend in those strange three lines! 
No question, that adventure came to pass 
One black night in Arcadia: yes, the pines, 
Mountains and valleys mingling made one mass 
Of black with void black heaven: the earth's confines, 
The sky's embrace,--below, above, around, 
All hardened into black without a bound. 

Fill up a swart stone chalice to the brim 
With fresh-squeezed yet fast-thickening poppy-juice: 
See how the sluggish jelly, late a-swim, 
Turns marble to the touch of who would loose 
The solid smooth, grown jet from rim to rim, 
By turning round the bowl! So night can fuse 
Earth with her all-comprising sky. No less, 
Light, the least spark, shows air and emptiness. 

And thus it proved when--diving into space, 
Stript of all vapor, from each web of mist, 
Utterly film-free--entered on her race 
The naked Moon, full-orbed antagonist 
Of night and dark, night's dowry: peak to base, 
Upstarted mountains, and each valley, kissed 
To sudden life, lay silver-bright: in air 
Flew she revealed, Maid-Moon with limbs all bare. 

Still as she fled, each depth,--where refuge seemed-- 
Opening a lone pale chamber, left distinct 
Those limbs: mid still-retreating blue, she teemed 
Herself with whiteness,--virginal, uncinct 
By any halo save what finely gleamed 
To outline not disguise her: heavenwas linked 
In one accord with earth to quaff the joy, 
Drain beauty to the dregs without alloy. 

Whereof she grew aware. What help? When, lo, 
A succorable cloud with sleep lay dense: 
Some pinetree-top had caught it sailing slow, 
And tethered for a prize: in evidence 
Captive lay fleece on fleece of piled-up snow 
Drowsily patient: flake-heaped how or whence, 
The structure of that succorable cloud, 
What matter? Shamed she plunged into its shroud. 

Orbed--so the woman-figure poets call 
Because of rounds on rounds--that apple-shaped 
Head which its hair binds close into a ball 
Each side the curving ears--that pure undraped 
Pout of the sister paps--that . . . once for all, 
Say--her consummate circle thus escaped 
With its innumerous circlets, sank absorbed, 
Safe in the cloud--O naked Moon full-orbed! 

But what means this? The downy swathes combine, 
Conglobe, the smothery coy-caressing stuff 
Curdles about her! Vain each twist and twine 
Those lithe limbs try, encroached on by a fluff 
Fitting as close as fits the dented spine 
Its flexible ivory outside-flesh: enough! 
The plumy drifts contract, condense, constringe, 
Till she is swallowed by the feathery springe. 

As when a pearl slips lost in the thin foam 
Churned on a sea-shore, and, o'er-frothed, conceits 
Herself safe-housed in Amphitrite's dome,-- 
If, through the bladdery wave-worked yeast, she meets 
What most she loathes and leaps from,--elf from gnome 
No gladlier,--finds that safest of retreats 
Bubble about a treacherous hand wide ope 
To grasp her--(divers who pick pearls so grope)-- 

So lay this Maid-Moon clasped around and caught 
By rough red Pan, the god of all that tract: 
He it was schemed the snare thus subtly wrought 
With simulated earth-breath,--wool-tufts packed 
Into a billowy wrappage. Sheep far-sought 
For spotless shearings yield such: take the fact 
As learned Virgil gives it,--how the breed 
Whitens itself forever: yes, indeed! 

If one forefather ram, though pure as chalk 
From tinge on fleece, should still display a tongue 
Black 'neath the beast's moist palate, prompt men balk 
The propagating plague: he gets no young: 
They rather slay him,--sell his hide to calk 
Ships with, first steeped with pitch,--nor hands are wrung 
In sorrow for his fate: protected thus, 
The purity we loved is gained for us. So did girl-Moon, by just her attribute 
Of unmatched modesty betrayed, lie trapped, 
Bruised to the breast of Pan, half god half brute, 
Raked by his bristly boar-sward while he lapped 
--Never say, kissed her! that were to pollute 
Love's language--which moreover proves unapt 
To tell how she recoiled--as who finds thorns 
Where she sought flowers--when, feeling, she touched--horns! 

Then--does the legend say?--first moon-eclipse 
Happened, first swooning-fit which puzzled sore 
The early sages? Is that why she dips 
Into the dark, a minute and no more, 
Only so long as serves her while she rips 
The cloud's womb through and, faultless as before, 
Pursues her way? No lesson for a maid 
Left she, a maid herself thus trapped, betrayed? 

Ha, Virgil? Tell the rest, you! "To the deep 
Of his domain the wildwood, Pan forthwith 
Called her, and so she followed"--in her sleep, 
Surely?--"by no means spurning him." The myth 
Explain who may! Let all else go, I keep 
--As of a ruin just a monolith-- 
Thus much, one verse of five words, each a boon: 
Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon.
Written by Robert Browning | Create an image from this poem

Waring

 I

What's become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip,
Chose land-travel or seafaring,
Boots and chest, or staff and scrip,
Rather than pace up and down
Any longer London-town?

Who'd have guessed it from his lip,
Or his brow's accustomed bearing,
On the night he thus took ship,
Or started landward?—little caring
For us, it seems, who supped together,
(Friends of his too, I remember)
And walked home through the merry weather,
The snowiest in all December;
I left his arm that night myself
For what's-his-name's, the new prose-poet,
That wrote the book there, on the shelf— 
How, forsooth, was I to know it
If Waring meant to glide away
Like a ghost at break of day?
Never looked he half so gay!

He was prouder than the devil:
How he must have cursed our revel!
Ay, and many other meetings,
Indoor visits, outdoor greetings,
As up and down he paced this London,
With no work done, but great works undone,
Where scarce twenty knew his name.
Why not, then, have earlier spoken,
Written, bustled? Who's to blame
If your silence kept unbroken?
"True, but there were sundry jottings,
Stray-leaves, fragments, blurrs and blottings,
Certain first steps were achieved
Already which—(is that your meaning?)
Had well borne out whoe'er believed
In more to come!" But who goes gleaning
Hedge-side chance-blades, while full-sheaved
Stand cornfields by him? Pride, o'erweening
Pride alone, puts forth such claims
O'er the day's distinguished names.

Meantime, how much I loved him,
I find out now I've lost him:
I, who cared not if I moved him,
Henceforth never shall get free
Of his ghostly company,
His eyes that just a little wink
As deep I go into the merit
Of this and that distinguished spirit— 
His cheeks' raised colour, soon to sink,
As long I dwell on some stupendous
And tremendous (Heaven defend us!)
Monstr'-inform'-ingens-horrend-ous
Demoniaco-seraphic
Penman's latest piece of graphic.
Nay, my very wrist grows warm
With his dragging weight of arm!
E'en so, swimmingly appears,
Through one's after-supper musings,
Some lost Lady of old years,
With her beauteous vain endeavour,
And goodness unrepaid as ever;
The face, accustomed to refusings,
We, puppies that we were... Oh never
Surely, nice of conscience, scrupled
Being aught like false, forsooth, to?
Telling aught but honest truth to?
What a sin, had we centupled
Its possessor's grace and sweetness!
No! she heard in its completeness
Truth, for truth's a weighty matter,
And, truth at issue, we can't flatter!
Well, 'tis done with: she's exempt
From damning us through such a sally;
And so she glides, as down a valley,
Taking up with her contempt,
Past our reach; and in, the flowers
Shut her unregarded hours.


Oh, could I have him back once more,
This Waring, but one half-day more!
Back, with the quiet face of yore,
So hungry for acknowledgment
Like mine! I'd fool him to his bent!
Feed, should not he, to heart's content?
I'd say, "to only have conceived
Your great works, though they ne'er make progress,
Surpasses all we've yet achieved!"
I'd lie so, I should be believed.
I'd make such havoc of the claims
Of the day's distinguished names
To feast him with, as feasts an ogress
Her sharp-toothed golden-crowned child!
Or, as one feasts a creature rarely
Captured here, unreconciled
To capture; and completely gives
Its pettish humours licence, barely
Requiring that it lives.

Ichabod, Ichabod,
The glory is departed!
Travels Waring East away?
Who, of knowledge, by hearsay,
Reports a man upstarted
Somewhere as a God,
Hordes grown European-hearted,
Millions of the wild made tame
On a sudden at his fame?
In Vishnu-land what Avatar?
Or who, in Moscow, toward the Czar,
With the demurest of footfalls
Over the Kremlin's pavement, bright
With serpentine and syenite,
Steps, with five other generals,
That simultaneously take snuff,
For each to have pretext enough
To kerchiefwise unfurl his sash
Which, softness' self, is yet the stuff
To hold fast where a steel chain snaps,
And leave the grand white neck no gash?
Waring, in Moscow, to those rough
Cold northern natures borne, perhaps,
Like the lambwhite maiden dear
From the circle of mute kings,
Unable to repress the tear,
Each as his sceptre down he flings,
To Dian's fane at Taurica,
Where now a captive priestess, she alway
Mingles her tender grave Hellenic speech
With theirs, tuned to the hailstone-beaten beach,
As pours some pigeon, from the myrrhy lands
Rapt by the whirlblast to fierce Scythian strands
Where bred the swallows, her melodious cry
Amid their barbarous twitter!
In Russia? Never! Spain were fitter!
Ay, most likely, 'tis in Spain
That we and Waring meet again— 
Now, while he turns down that cool narrow lane
Into the blackness, out of grave Madrid
All fire and shine—abrupt as when there's slid
Its stiff gold blazing pall
From some black coffin-lid.
Or, best of all,
I love to think
The leaving us was just a feint;
Back here to London did he slink;
And now works on without a wink
Of sleep, and we are on the brink
Of something great in fresco-paint:
Some garret's ceiling, walls and floor,
Up and down and o'er and o'er
He splashes, as none splashed before
Since great Caldara Polidore:
Or Music means this land of ours
Some favour yet, to pity won
By Purcell from his Rosy Bowers,— 
"Give me my so long promised son,
Let Waring end what I begun!"
Then down he creeps and out he steals
Only when the night conceals
His face—in Kent 'tis cherry-time,
Or, hops are picking; or, at prime
Of March, he wanders as, too happy,
Years ago when he was young,
Some mild eve when woods grew sappy,
And the early moths had sprung
To life from many a trembling sheath
Woven the warm boughs beneath;
While small birds said to themselves
What should soon be actual song,
And young gnats, by tens and twelves,
Made as if they were the throng
That crowd around and carry aloft
The sound they have nursed, so sweet and pure,
Out of a myriad noises soft,
Into a tone that can endure
Amid the noise of a July noon,
When all God's creatures crave their boon,
All at once and all in tune,
And get it, happy as Waring then,
Having first within his ken
What a man might do with men,
And far too glad, in the even-glow,
To mix with your world he meant to take
Into his hand, he told you, so— 
And out of it his world to make,
To contract and to expand
As he shut or oped his hand.
Oh, Waring, what's to really be?
A clear stage and a crowd to see!
Some Garrick—say—out shall not he
The heart of Hamlet's mystery pluck
Or, where most unclean beasts are rife,
Some Junius—am I right?—shall tuck
His sleeve, and out with flaying-knife!
Some Chatterton shall have the luck
Of calling Rowley into life!
Some one shall somehow run amuck
With this old world, for want of strife
Sound asleep: contrive, contrive
To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive?
Our men scarce seem in earnest now:
Distinguished names!—but 'tis, somehow
As if they played at being names
Still more distinguished, like the games
Of children. Turn our sport to earnest
With a visage of the sternest!
Bring the real times back, confessed
Still better than our very best!

II

"When I last saw Waring..."
(How all turned to him who spoke— 
You saw Waring? Truth or joke?
In land-travel, or seafaring?)

"...We were sailing by Triest,
Where a day or two we harboured:
A sunset was in the West,
When, looking over the vessel's side,
One of our company espied
A sudden speck to larboard.
And, as a sea-duck flies and swins
At once, so came the light craft up,
With its sole lateen sail that trims
And turns (the water round its rims
Dancing, as round a sinking cup)
And by us like a fish it curled,
And drew itself up close beside,
Its great sail on the instant furled,
And o'er its planks, a shrill voice cried
(A neck as bronzed as a Lascar's)
'Buy wine of us, you English Brig?
Or fruit, tobacco and cigars?
A Pilot for you to Triest?
Without one, look you ne'er so big,
They'll never let you up the bay!
We natives should know best.'
I turned, and 'just those fellows' way,'
Our captain said, 'The long-shore thieves
Are laughing at us in their sleeves.'

"In truth, the boy leaned laughing back;
And one, half-hidden by his side
Under the furled sail, soon I spied,
With great grass hat, and kerchief black,
Who looked up, with his kingly throat,
Said somewhat, while the other shook
His hair back from his eyes to look
Their longest at us; then the boat,
I know not how, turned sharply round,
Laying her whole side on the sea
As a leaping fish does; from the lee
Into the weather, cut somehow
Her sparkling path beneath our bow;
And so went off, as with a bound,
Into the rose and golden half
Of the sky, to overtake the sun,
And reach the shore, like the sea-calf
Its singing cave; yet I caught one
Glance ere away the boat quite passed,
And neither time nor toil could mar
Those features: so I saw the last
Of Waring!"—You? Oh, never star
Was lost here, but it rose afar!
Look East, where whole new thousands are!
In Vishnu-land what Avatar?
Written by Rudyard Kipling | Create an image from this poem

Mulhollands Contract

 The fear was on the cattle, for the gale was on the sea,
An' the pens broke up on the lower deck an' let the creatures free --
An' the lights went out on the lower deck, an' no one near but me.

I had been singin' to them to keep 'em quiet there,
For the lower deck is the dangerousest, requirin' constant care,
An' give to me as the strongest man, though used to drink and swear.

I see my chance was certain of bein' horned or trod,
For the lower deck was packed with steers thicker'n peas in a pod,
An' more pens broke at every roll -- so I made a Contract with God.

An' by the terms of the Contract, as I have read the same,
If He got me to port alive I would exalt His Name,
An' praise His Holy Majesty till further orders came.

He saved me from the cattle an' He saved me from the sea,
For they found me 'tween two drownded ones where the roll had landed me --
An' a four-inch crack on top of my head, as crazy as could be.

But that were done by a stanchion, an' not by a bullock at all,
An' I lay still for seven weeks convalessing of the fall,
An' readin' the shiny Scripture texts in the Seaman's Hospital.

An' I spoke to God of our Contract, an' He says to my prayer:
"I never puts on My ministers no more than they can bear.
So back you go to the cattle-boats an' preach My Gospel there.

"For human life is chancy at any kind of trade,
But most of all, as well you know, when the steers are mad-afraid;
So you go back to the cattle-boats an' preach 'em as I've said.

"They must quit drinkin' an' swearin', they mustn't knife on a blow,
They must quit gamblin' their wages, and you must preach it so;
For now those boats are more like Hell than anything else I know."

I didn't want to do it, for I knew what I should get,
An' I wanted to preach Religion, handsome an' out of the wet,
But the Word of the Lord were lain on me, an' I done what I was set.

I have been smit an' bruis]ed, as warned would be the case,
An' turned my cheek to the smiter exactly as Scripture says;
But following that, I knocked him down an' led him up to Grace.

An' we have preaching on Sundays whenever the sea is calm,
An' I use no knife or pistol an' I never take no harm,
For the Lord abideth back of me to guide my fighting arm.

An' I sign for four-pound-ten a month and save the money clear,
An' I am in charge of the lower deck, an' I never lose a steer;
An' I believe in Almighty God an' preach His Gospel here.

The skippers say I'm crazy, but I can prove 'em wrong,
For I am in charge of the lower deck with all that doth belong --
Which they would not give to a lunatic, and the competition so strong!

Book: Reflection on the Important Things