Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Earthquake Poems

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

Search and read the best famous Earthquake poems, articles about Earthquake poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Earthquake poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by Victor Hugo | Create an image from this poem

A Sunset

 I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens, 
Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens, 
In numerous leafage bosomed close; 
Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer, 
Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere 
On cloudy archipelagos. 

Oh, gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion, 
Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion, 
Their unimagined shapes accord: 
Under their waves at intervals flame a pale levin through, 
As if some giant of the air amid the vapors drew 
A sudden elemental sword. 

The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold; 
And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold, 
The thatched roof of a cot a-glance; 
Or on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze; 
Or pools the blooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze, 
Great moveless meres of radiance. 

Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track, 
Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back, 
A triple row of pointed teeth? 
Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide, 
The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds in tenebrous side 
With scales of golden mail ensheathe. 

Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees. 
Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice 
Ruins immense in mounded wrack; 
Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone 
Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown 
When the earthquake heaves its hugy back. 

These vapors, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronzèd glows, 
Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose, 
Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms,-- 
'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep, 
As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep 
His dreadful and resounding arms! 

All vanishes! The Sun, from topmost heaven precipitated, 
Like a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red 
Into the furnace stirred to fume, 
Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire, 
Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire 
The vaporous and inflamèd spaume. 

O contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale, 
In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil? 
With love that has not speech for need! 
Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite: 
If winter hue them like a pall, or if the summer night 
Fantasy them starre brede.


Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Courage

 It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.
Written by Derek Walcott | Create an image from this poem

The Star-Apple Kingdom

 There were still shards of an ancient pastoral 
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank 
their pools of shadow from an older sky, 
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as 
"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye." 
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel 
sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees, 
and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules 
on the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat 
in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues 
of Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering 
their source, Parish Trelawny, Parish St David, Parish 
St Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures, 
the lime groves and fences of marl stone and the cattle 
with a docile longing, an epochal content. 
And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic, 
among the boas and parasols and the tea-colored 
daguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness 
as ordered and infinite to the child 
as the great house road to the Great House 
down a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manes 
in time to the horses, an orderly life 
reduced by lorgnettes day and night, one disc the sun, 
the other the moon, reduced into a pier glass: 
nannies diminished to dolls, mahogany stairways 
no larger than those of an album in which 
the flash of cutlery yellows, as gamboge as 
the piled cakes of teatime on that latticed 
bougainvillea verandah that looked down toward 
a prospect of Cuyp-like Herefords under a sky 
lurid as a porcelain souvenir with these words: 
"Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye." 

Strange, that the rancor of hatred hid in that dream 
of slow rivers and lily-like parasols, in snaps 
of fine old colonial families, curled at the edge 
not from age of from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all, 
but because, off at its edges, innocently excluded 
stood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners, 
the tenants, the good ******* down in the village, 
their mouth in the locked jaw of a silent scream. 
A scream which would open the doors to swing wildly 
all night, that was bringing in heavier clouds, 
more black smoke than cloud, frightening the cattle 
in whose bulging eyes the Great House diminished; 
a scorching wind of a scream 
that began to extinguish the fireflies, 
that dried the water mill creaking to a stop 
as it was about to pronounce Parish Trelawny 
all over, in the ancient pastoral voice, 
a wind that blew all without bending anything, 
neither the leaves of the album nor the lime groves; 
blew Nanny floating back in white from a feather 
to a chimerical, chemical pin speck that shrank 
the drinking Herefords to brown porcelain cows 
on a mantelpiece, Trelawny trembling with dusk, 
the scorched pastures of the old benign Custos; blew 
far the decent servants and the lifelong cook, 
and shriveled to a shard that ancient pastoral 
of dusk in a gilt-edged frame now catching the evening sun 
in Jamaica, making both epochs one. 

He looked out from the Great House windows on 
clouds that still held the fragrance of fire, 
he saw the Botanical Gardens officially drown 
in a formal dusk, where governors had strolled 
and black gardeners had smiled over glinting shears 
at the lilies of parasols on the floating lawns, 
the flame trees obeyed his will and lowered their wicks, 
the flowers tightened their fists in the name of thrift, 
the porcelain lamps of ripe cocoa, the magnolia's jet 
dimmed on the one circuit with the ginger lilies 
and left a lonely bulb on the verandah, 
and, had his mandate extended to that ceiling 
of star-apple candelabra, he would have ordered 
the sky to sleep, saying, I'm tired, 
save the starlight for victories, we can't afford it, 
leave the moon on for one more hour,and that's it. 
But though his power, the given mandate, extended 
from tangerine daybreaks to star-apple dusks, 
his hand could not dam that ceaseless torrent of dust 
that carried the shacks of the poor, to their root-rock music, 
down the gullies of Yallahs and August Town, 
to lodge them on thorns of maca, with their rags 
crucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons; 
from the black Warieka Hills the sky glowed fierce as 
the dials of a million radios, 
a throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid 
where the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston. 
He saw the fountains dried of quadrilles, the water-music 
of the country dancers, the fiddlers like fifes 
put aside. He had to heal 
this malarial island in its bath of bay leaves, 
its forests tossing with fever, the dry cattle 
groaning like winches, the grass that kept shaking 
its head to remember its name. No vowels left 
in the mill wheel, the river. Rock stone. Rock stone. 

The mountains rolled like whales through phosphorous stars, 
as he swayed like a stone down fathoms into sleep, 
drawn by that magnet which pulls down half the world 
between a star and a star, by that black power 
that has the assassin dreaming of snow, 
that poleaxes the tyrant to a sleeping child. 
The house is rocking at anchor, but as he falls 
his mind is a mill wheel in moonlight, 
and he hears, in the sleep of his moonlight, the drowned 
bell of Port Royal's cathedral, sees the copper pennies 
of bubbles rising from the empty eye-pockets 
of green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating 
from the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea horses 
drawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade 
across the moss-green meadows of the sea; 
he heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes, 
a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted 
by water, a crab climbing the steeple, 
and he climbed from that submarine kingdom 
as the evening lights came on in the institute, 
the scholars lamplit in their own aquarium, 
he saw them mouthing like parrot fish, as he passed 
upward from that baptism, their history lessons, 
the bubbles like ideas which he could not break: 
Jamaica was captured by Penn and Venables, 
Port Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake. 

Before the coruscating façades of cathedrals 
from Santiago to Caracas, where penitential archbishops 
washed the feet of paupers (a parenthetical moment 
that made the Caribbean a baptismal font, 
turned butterflies to stone, and whitened like doves 
the buzzards circling municipal garbage), 
the Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin 
in the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved 
of a history which they did not commit; 
the slave pardoned his whip, and the dispossessed 
said the rosary of islands for three hundred years, 
a hymn that resounded like the hum of the sea 
inside a sea cave, as their knees turned to stone, 
while the bodies of patriots were melting down walls 
still crusted with mute outcries of La Revolucion! 
"San Salvador, pray for us,St. Thomas, San Domingo, 
ora pro nobis, intercede for us, Sancta Lucia 
of no eyes," and when the circular chaplet 
reached the last black bead of Sancta Trinidad 
they began again, their knees drilled into stone, 
where Colon had begun, with San Salvador's bead, 
beads of black colonies round the necks of Indians. 
And while they prayed for an economic miracle, 
ulcers formed on the municipal portraits, 
the hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels, 
and the empires of tobacco, sugar, and bananas, 
until a black woman, shawled like a buzzard, 
climbed up the stairs and knocked at the door 
of his dream, whispering in the ear of the keyhole: 
"Let me in, I'm finished with praying, I'm the Revolution. 
I am the darker, the older America." 

She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise, 
her voice had the gutturals of machine guns 
across khaki deserts where the cactus flower 
detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat 
of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow. 
She was a black umbrella blown inside out 
by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa, 
a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence, 
raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin 
transfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars, 
a stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue 
to the tortures done in the name of the Father, 
would curdle the blood of the marauding wolf, 
the fountain of generals, poets, and cripples 
who danced without moving over their graves 
with each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched 
by the teeth of machine guns,and every sunset 
she carried the Caribbean's elliptical basin 
as she had once carried the penitential napkins 
to be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado, 
and those whose faces had yellowed like posters 
on municipal walls. Now she stroked his hair 
until it turned white, but she would not understand 
that he wanted no other power but peace, 
that he wanted a revolution without any bloodshed, 
he wanted a history without any memory, 
streets without statues, 
and a geography without myth. He wanted no armies 
but those regiments of bananas, thick lances of cane, 
and he sobbed,"I am powerless, except for love." 
She faded from him, because he could not kill; 
she shrunk to a bat that hung day and night 
in the back of his brain. He rose in his dream. 
(to be continued)
Written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Create an image from this poem

Christmas Bells

 "I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Then from each black accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"


Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: 
"God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!"
Written by Duncan Campbell Scott | Create an image from this poem

The Harvest

 Sun on the mountain,
Shade in the valley,
Ripple and lightness
Leaping along the world,
Sun, like a gold sword
Plucked from the scabbard,
Striking the wheat-fields,
Splendid and lusty,
Close-standing, full-headed,
Toppling with plenty;
Shade, like a buckler
Kindly and ample,
Sweeping the wheat-fields
Darkening and tossing;
There on the world-rim
Winds break and gather
Heaping the mist
For the pyre of the sunset;
And still as a shadow,
In the dim westward,
A cloud sloop of amethyst
Moored to the world
With cables of rain.

Acres of gold wheat
Stir in the sunshine,
Rounding the hill-top,
Crested with plenty,
Filling the valley,
Brimmed with abundance,
Wind in the wheat-field
Eddying and settling,
Swaying it, sweeping it,
Lifting the rich heads,
Tossing them soothingly
Twinkle and shimmer
The lights and the shadowings,
Nimble as moonlight
Astir in the mere.
Laden with odors
Of peace and of plenty,
Soft comes the wind
From the ranks of the wheat-field,
Bearing a promise 
Of harvest and sickle-time,
Opulent threshing-floors
Dusty and dim 
With the whirl of the flail,
And wagons of bread,
Sown-laden and lumbering
Through the gateways of cities.

When will the reapers 
Strike in their sickles,
Bending and grasping,
Shearing and spreading;
When will the gleaners
Searching the stubble
Take the last wheat-heads
Home in their arms ?

Ask not the question! -
Something tremendous
Moves to the answer.

Hunger and poverty
Heaped like the ocean
Welters and mutters,
Hold back the sickles!

Millions of children
Born to their mothers' womb,
Starved at the nipple, cry,--
Ours is the harvest!
Millions of women 
Learned in the tragical
Secrets of poverty,
Sweated and beaten, cry,--
Hold back the sickles!

Millions of men
With a vestige of manhood,
Wild-eyed and gaunt-throated,
Shout with a leonine
Accent of anger,
Leaves us the wheat-fields!

When will the reapers 
Strike in their sickles?
Ask not the question;
Something tremendous
Moves to the answer.

Long have they sharpened
Their fiery, impetuous
Sickles of carnage,
Welded them aeons
Ago in the mountains
Of suffering and anguish;
Hearts were their hammers 
Blood was their fire,
Sorrow their anvil,
(Trusty the sickle
Tempered with tears;)
Time they had plenty-
Harvests and harvests
Passed them in agony,
Only a half-filled
Ear for their lot;
Man that has taken
God for a master
Made him a law,
Mocked him and cursed him,
Set up this hunger,
Called it necessity,
Put in the blameless mouth
Juda's language:
The poor ye have with you
Always, unending.
But up from the impotent
Anguish of children,
Up from the labor
Fruitless, unmeaning,
Of millions of mothers,
Hugely necessitous,
Grew by a just law
Stern and implacable,
Art born of poverty,
The making of sickles
Meet for the harvest.

And now to the wheat-fields
Come the weird reapers
Armed with their sickles,
Whipping them keenly
In the fresh-air fields,
Wild with the joy of them,
Finding them trusty,
Hilted with teen.
Swarming like ants,
The Idea for captain,
No banners, no bugles,
Only a terrible
Ground-bass of gathering
Tempest and fury,
Only a tossing
Of arms and of garments;
Sexless and featureless,
(Only the children
Different among them,
Crawling between their feet,
Borne on their shoulders;)
Rolling their shaggy heads
Wild with the unheard-of
Drug of the sunshine;
Tears that had eaten
The half of their eyelids
Dry on their cheeks;
Blood in their stiffened hair
Clouted and darkened;
Down in their cavern hearts
Hunger the tiger,
Leaping, exulting;
Sighs that had choked them
Burst into triumphing;
On they come, Victory!
Up to the wheat-fields,
Dreamed of in visions
Bred by the hunger,
Seen for the first time
Splendid and golden;
On they come fluctuant,
Seething and breaking,
Weltering like fire
In the pit of the earthquake,
Bursting in heaps
With the sudden intractable
Lust of the hunger:
Then when they see them-
The miles of the harvest
White in the sunshine,
Rushing and stumbling,
With the mighty and clamorous
Cry of a people
Starved from creation,
Hurl themselves onward,
Deep in the wheat-fields,
Weeping like children,
After ages and ages,
Back at the mother the earth.
Night in the valley,
Gloom on the mountain,
Wind in the wheat,
Far to the southward
The flutter of lightning,
The shudder of thunder;
But high at the zenith,
A cluster of stars
Glimmers and throbs
In the gasp of the midnight,
Steady and absolute,
Ancient and sure


Written by Percy Bysshe Shelley | Create an image from this poem

Epipsychidion (excerpt)

 Emily, 
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor,
No keel has ever plough'd that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me?
Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest
Is a far Eden of the purple East;
And we between her wings will sit, while Night,
And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight,
Our ministers, along the boundless Sea,
Treading each other's heels, unheededly.
It is an isle under Ionian skies,
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise,
And, for the harbours are not safe and good,
This land would have remain'd a solitude
But for some pastoral people native there,
Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,
Simple and spirited; innocent and bold.
The blue Aegean girds this chosen home,
With ever-changing sound and light and foam,
Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar;
And all the winds wandering along the shore
Undulate with the undulating tide:
There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide;
And many a fountain, rivulet and pond,
As clear as elemental diamond,
Or serene morning air; and far beyond,
The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer
(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year)
Pierce into glades, caverns and bowers, and halls
Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls
Illumining, with sound that never fails
Accompany the noonday nightingales;
And all the place is peopled with sweet airs;
The light clear element which the isle wears
Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,
Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers,
And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;
And from the moss violets and jonquils peep
And dart their arrowy odour through the brain
Till you might faint with that delicious pain.
And every motion, odour, beam and tone,
With that deep music is in unison:
Which is a soul within the soul--they seem
Like echoes of an antenatal dream.
It is an isle 'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth and Sea,
Cradled and hung in clear tranquillity;
Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer,
Wash'd by the soft blue Oceans of young air.
It is a favour'd place. Famine or Blight,
Pestilence, War and Earthquake, never light
Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they
Sail onward far upon their fatal way:
The wingèd storms, chanting their thunder-psalm
To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm
Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew,
From which its fields and woods ever renew
Their green and golden immortality.
And from the sea there rise, and from the sky
There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright,
Veil after veil, each hiding some delight,
Which Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside,
Till the isle's beauty, like a naked bride
Glowing at once with love and loveliness,
Blushes and trembles at its own excess:
Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less
Burns in the heart of this delicious isle,
An atom of th' Eternal, whose own smile
Unfolds itself, and may be felt not seen
O'er the gray rocks, blue waves and forests green,
Filling their bare and void interstices.
But the chief marvel of the wilderness
Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how
None of the rustic island-people know:
'Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height
It overtops the woods; but, for delight,
Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime
Had been invented, in the world's young prime,
Rear'd it, a wonder of that simple time,
An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house
Made sacred to his sister and his spouse.
It scarce seems now a wreck of human art,
But, as it were, Titanic; in the heart
Of Earth having assum'd its form, then grown
Out of the mountains, from the living stone,
Lifting itself in caverns light and high:
For all the antique and learned imagery
Has been eras'd, and in the place of it
The ivy and the wild-vine interknit
The volumes of their many-twining stems;
Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems
The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky
Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery
With moonlight patches, or star atoms keen,
Or fragments of the day's intense serene;
Working mosaic on their Parian floors.
And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers
And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem
To sleep in one another's arms, and dream
Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we
Read in their smiles, and call reality.

This isle and house are mine, and I have vow'd
Thee to be lady of the solitude.
And I have fitted up some chambers there
Looking towards the golden Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below.
I have sent books and music there, and all
Those instruments with which high Spirits call
The future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grave, and make the present last
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,
Folded within their own eternity.
Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste
The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,
Nature with all her children haunts the hill.
The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet
Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit
Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance
Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;
The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight
Before our gate, and the slow, silent night
Is measur'd by the pants of their calm sleep.
Be this our home in life, and when years heap
Their wither'd hours, like leaves, on our decay,
Let us become the overhanging day,
The living soul of this Elysian isle,
Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile
We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,
Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,
And wander in the meadows, or ascend
The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea,
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy--
Possessing and possess'd by all that is
Within that calm circumference of bliss,
And by each other, till to love and live
Be one: or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep
The moonlight of the expir'd night asleep,
Through which the awaken'd day can never peep;
A veil for our seclusion, close as night's,
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.
And we will talk, until thought's melody
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confus'd in Passion's golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigur'd; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbu'd
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!
Written by Percy Bysshe Shelley | Create an image from this poem

Mont Blanc

 (Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni)

1

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, - with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, amon the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

2

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve - dark, deep Ravine-
Thou many-colored, many voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest; -thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging
To hear - an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep
Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;-
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound-
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

3

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,-that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live. -I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far and round and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes amon the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears,-still snowy and serene-
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there - how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. -Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-demon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
None can reply - all seems eternal now.
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

4

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower; -the bound
With which from that detested trance they leap;
The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
And that of him, and all that his may be;
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.
Power dwells apart in its tranquility,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
And their place is not known. Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands , for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapors to the circling air.

5

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:-the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them:-Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapor broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
Written by Ted Hughes | Create an image from this poem

Crow Goes Hunting

Crow
Decided to try words. 

He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack-
Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained, 
With strong teeth. 
You could not find a better bred lot. 

He pointed out the hare and away went the words
Resounding. 
Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare? 

It converted itself to a concrete bunker. 
The words circled protesting, resounding. 

Crow turned the words into bombs-they blasted the bunker. 
The bits of bunker flew up-a flock of starlings. 

Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the starlings. 
The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst. 

Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water. 
The water turned into an earthquake, swallowing the reservoir. 

The earthquake turned into a hare and leaped for the hill
Having eaten Crow's words. 

Crow gazed after the bounding hare
Speechless with admiration. 
Written by George (Lord) Byron | Create an image from this poem

Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte

 I 
'Tis done -- but yesterday a King! 
And arm'd with Kings to strive -- 
And now thou art a nameless thing: 
So abject -- yet alive! 
Is this the man of thousand thrones, 
Who strew'd our earth with hostile bones, 
And can he thus survive? 
Since he, miscall'd the Morning Star, 
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far. 

II 
Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind 
Who bow'd so low the knee? 
By gazing on thyself grown blind, 
Thou taught'st the rest to see. 
With might unquestion'd, -- power to save, -- 
Thine only gift hath been the grave, 
To those that worshipp'd thee; 
Nor till thy fall could mortals guess 
Ambition's less than littleness! 

III 
Thanks for that lesson -- It will teach 
To after-warriors more, 
Than high Philosophy can preach, 
And vainly preach'd before. 
That spell upon the minds of men 
Breaks never to unite again, 
That led them to adore 
Those Pagod things of sabre sway 
With fronts of brass, and feet of clay. 

IV 
The triumph and the vanity, 
The rapture of the strife -- 
The earthquake voice of Victory, 
To thee the breath of life; 
The sword, the sceptre, and that sway 
Which man seem'd made but to obey, 
Wherewith renown was rife -- 
All quell'd! -- Dark Spirit! what must be 
The madness of thy memory! 

V 
The Desolator desolate! 
The Victor overthrown! 
The Arbiter of others' fate 
A Suppliant for his own! 
Is it some yet imperial hope 
That with such change can calmly cope? 
Or dread of death alone? 
To die a prince -- or live a slave -- 
Thy choice is most ignobly brave! 

VI 
He who of old would rend the oak, 
Dream'd not of the rebound: 
Chain'd by the trunk he vainly broke -- 
Alone -- how look'd he round? 
Thou, in the sternness of thy strength, 
An equal deed hast done at length, 
And darker fate hast found: 
He fell, the forest prowler's prey; 
But thou must eat thy heart away! 

VII 
The Roman, when his burning heart 
Was slaked with blood of Rome, 
Threw down the dagger -- dared depart, 
In savage grandeur, home -- 
He dared depart in utter scorn 
Of men that such a yoke had borne, 
Yet left him such a doom! 
His only glory was that hour 
Of self-upheld abandon'd power. 

VIII 
The Spaniard, when the lust of sway 
Had lost its quickening spell, 
Cast crowns for rosaries away, 
An empire for a cell; 
A strict accountant of his beads, 
A subtle disputant on creeds, 
His dotage trifled well: 
Yet better had he neither known 
A bigot's shrine, nor despot's throne. 

IX 
But thou -- from thy reluctant hand 
The thunderbolt is wrung -- 
Too late thou leav'st the high command 
To which thy weakness clung; 
All Evil Spirit as thou art, 
It is enough to grieve the heart 
To see thine own unstrung; 
To think that God's fair world hath been 
The footstool of a thing so mean; 
X 
And Earth hath spilt her blood for him, 
Who thus can hoard his own! 
And Monarchs bow'd the trembling limb, 
And thank'd him for a throne! 
Fair Freedom! we may hold thee dear, 
When thus thy mightiest foes their fear 
In humblest guise have shown. 
Oh! ne'er may tyrant leave behind 
A brighter name to lure mankind! 

XI 
Thine evil deeds are writ in gore, 
Nor written thus in vain -- 
Thy triumphs tell of fame no more, 
Or deepen every stain: 
If thou hadst died as honour dies, 
Some new Napoleon might arise, 
To shame the world again -- 
But who would soar the solar height, 
To set in such a starless night? 

XII 
Weigh'd in the balance, hero dust 
Is vile as vulgar clay; 
Thy scales, Mortality! are just 
To all that pass away: 
But yet methought the living great 
Some higher sparks should animate, 
To dazzle and dismay: 
Nor deem'd Contempt could thus make mirth 
Of these, the Conquerors of the earth. 

XIII 
And she, proud Austria's mournful flower, 
Thy still imperial bride; 
How bears her breast the torturing hour? 
Still clings she to thy side? 
Must she too bend, must she too share 
Thy late repentance, long despair, 
Thou throneless Homicide? 
If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, -- 
'Tis worth thy vanish'd diadem! 

XIV 
Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle, 
And gaze upon the sea; 
That element may meet thy smile -- 
It ne'er was ruled by thee! 
Or trace with thine all idle hand 
In loitering mood upon the sand 
That Earth is now as free! 
That Corinth's pedagogue hath now 
Transferr'd his by-word to thy brow. 

XV 
Thou Timour! in his captive's cage 
What thought will there be thine, 
While brooding in thy prison'd rage? 
But one -- "The word was mine!" 
Unless, like he of Babylon, 
All sense is with thy sceptre gone, 
Life will not long confine 
That spirit pour'd so widely forth-- 
So long obey'd -- so little worth! 

XVI 
Or, like the thief of fire from heaven, 
Wilt thou withstand the shock? 
And share with him, the unforgiven, 
His vulture and his rock! 
Foredoom'd by God -- by man accurst, 
And that last act, though not thy worst, 
The very Fiend's arch mock; 
He in his fall preserved his pride, 
And, if a mortal, had as proudly died! 

XVII 
There was a day -- there was an hour, 
While earth was Gaul's -- Gaul thine -- 
When that immeasurable power 
Unsated to resign 
Had been an act of purer fame 
Than gathers round Marengo's name, 
And gilded thy decline, 
Through the long twilight of all time, 
Despite some passing clouds of crime. 

XVIII 
But thou forsooth must be a king, 
And don the purple vest, 
As if that foolish robe could wring 
Remembrance from thy breast. 
Where is that faded garment? where 
The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear, 
The star, the string, the crest? 
Vain froward child of empire! say, 
Are all thy playthings snatched away? 

XIX 
Where may the wearied eye repose 
When gazing on the Great; 
Where neither guilty glory glows, 
Nor despicable state? 
Yes --one--the first--the last--the best-- 
The Cincinnatus of the West, 
Whom envy dared not hate, 
Bequeath'd the name of Washington, 
To make man blush there was but one!
Written by Robinson Jeffers | Create an image from this poem

Meditation On Saviors

 I
When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
 and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
 little troublesome, a little terrible.

I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death
 nor in a walled garden,
In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that
 easily lock the world out of doors.

Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet
 granite sea-fang it is easy to praise
Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the
 herds of the people that one should love them?

If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder's
 delight in the herds of the future. Not yours.
Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy.
 Leave the joys of government to Caesar.

Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the
 world falls on decay in the flesh increasing
Comes one with a great level mind, sufficient vision, sufficient
 blindness, and clemency for love.

This is the breath of rottenness I smelt; from the world
 waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little,
Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the
 savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath.

The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love: but
 wisdom without love is the present savior,
Power without hatred, mind like a many-bladed machine subduing
 the world with deep indifference.

The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known;
 words and the little envies will hardly
Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they
 have never dared to confront.

II
Point Lobos lies over the hollowed water like a humped whale
 swimming to shoal; Point Lobos
Was wounded with that fire; the hills at Point Sur endured it;
 the palace at Thebes; the hill Calvary.

Out of incestuous love power and then ruin. A man forcing the
 imaginations of men,
Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his
 own household with impious desire.

King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears
 pouring from the torn pits
Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill
 in the earthquake, against the eclipse

Frightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the
 people: -that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist? -
I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to
 its expiation; I heard the same cry.

A bad mountain to build your world on. Am I another keeper of
 the people, that on my own shore,
On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the
 sicknesses I left behind me concern me?

Here where the surf has come incredible ways out of the splendid
 west, over the deeps
Light nor life sounds forever; here where enormous sundowns
 flower and burn through color to quietness;

Then the ecstasy of the stars is present? As for the people, I
 have found my rock, let them find theirs.
Let them lie down at Caesar's feet and be saved; and he in his
 time reap their daggers of gratitude.

III
Yet I am the one made pledges against the refuge contempt, that
 easily locks the world out of doors.
This people as much as the sea-granite is part of the God from
 whom I desire not to be fugitive.

I see them: they are always crying. The shored Pacific makes
 perpetual music, and the stone mountains
Their music of silence, the stars blow long pipings of light:
 the people are always crying in their hearts.

One need not pity; certainly one must not love. But who has seen
 peace, if he should tell them where peace
Lives in the world...they would be powerless to understand; and
 he is not willing to be reinvolved.

IV
How should one caught in the stone of his own person dare tell
 the people anything but relative to that?
But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once,
 of man and woman, of civilized

And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of
 living and dead, of human and not
Human, and dimly all the human future: -what should persuade him
 to speak? And what could his words change?

The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed. But
 the man's words would be fixed also,
Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same
 present compulsion in the iron consistency.

And nobody sees good or evil but out of a brain a hundred
 centuries quieted, some desert
Prophet's, a man humped like a camel, gone mad between the mud-
 walled village and the mountain sepulchres.

V
Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the
 open farms, and the people are fed.
They import and they consume reality. Before sunrise a hawk in
 the desert made them their thoughts.

VI
Here is an anxious people, rank with suppressed
 bloodthirstiness. Among the mild and unwarlike
Gautama needed but live greatly and be heard, Confucius needed
 but live greatly and be heard:

This people has not outgrown blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on
 the high cross to catch at their memories;
The price is known. I have quieted love; for love of the people
 I would not do it. For power I would do it.

--But that stands against reason: what is power to a dead man,
 dead under torture? --What is power to a man
Living, after the flesh is content? Reason is never a root,
 neither of act nor desire.

For power living I would never do it; they'are not delightful to
 touch, one wants to be separate. For power
After the nerves are put away underground, to lighten the
 abstract unborn children toward peace...

A man might have paid anguish indeed. Except he had found the
 standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
 that quiets the desire even of praising it.

VII
Yet look: are they not pitiable? No: if they lived forever they
 would be pitiable:
But a huge gift reserved quite overwhelms them at the end; they
 are able then to be still and not cry.

And having touched a little of the beauty and seen a little of
 the beauty of things, magically grow
Across the funeral fire or the hidden stench of burial
 themselves into the beauty they admired,

Themselves into the God, themselves into the sacred steep
 unconsciousness they used to mimic
Asleep between lamp's death and dawn, while the last drunkard
 stumbled homeward down the dark street.

They are not to be pitied but very fortunate; they need no
 savior, salvation comes and takes them by force,
It gathers them into the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the
 blown storms, the stream's-end ocean.

With this advantage over their granite grave-marks, of having
 realized the petulant human consciousness
Before, and then the greatness, the peace: drunk from both
 pitchers: these to be pitied? These not fortunate

But while he lives let each man make his health in his mind, to
 love the coast opposite humanity
And so be freed of love, laying it like bread on the waters; it
 is worst turned inward, it is best shot farthest.

Love, the mad wine of good and evil, the saint's and murderer's,
 the mote in the eye that makes its object
Shine the sun black; the trap in which it is better to catch the
 inhuman God than the hunter's own image.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things