Best Famous Looming Poems

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

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• All Famous Looming Poems

Written by Obi Nwakanma | The Four Seasons I ICICLES fall from trees, molten with age, without memory - they stand aloof in their nakedness - they limber; like the gods terrified into silence, like tall brooding deities looming out of the fog: The forest hugs them carves them into stones, Etches them into the slow eastern landscape: rivers, hills the slow running water, times broken inscapes… The willows are burdened with ice the white shrouds of burial spread upon the earth's ravaged face; the eyes unseeing, the mouth unspeaking, a gust of wind proclaims the anger of immemorial ages; the cycle, the eternal ritual of mystical returns - The cypress - whitening - boneless; wearing her best habit, a pale green in the forest of ghosts - And so I walk through this windless night through the narrow imponderable road through the silence - the silence of trees - I hear not even the gust of wind I hear only the quiet earth, thawing underneath; I hear the slow silent death of winter - where the sun is yellowest. But above, Monadnock looms like some angry Moloch, her white nipple seizing the space drained of all milk... A she-devil beckoning to worshippers seductive - her arm stretching outwards - to this lonely pilgrim lost in the mist: Behold the school of wild bucks Behold the meeting of incarnate spirits - Behold the lost souls bearing tapers in rags of rich damask, Down Thomas - the saint of unbelievers - down the road to bliss Down to the red house, uncertain like a beggar's bowl hanging unto the cliff of withdrawn pledges, where the well is deepest... I have dared to live beneath the great untamed. To every good, to every flicker of stars along the pine shadows; To every tussle with lucid dusk, To every moonlit pledge, to every turn made to outleap silvery pollen, I have desired to listen - to listen - to the ripening of seasons.... Winter 2001 This is ONE of a continuing sequence.

Written by Mark Doty | Visitation When I heard he had entered the harbor, and circled the wharf for days, I expected the worst: shallow water, confusion, some accident to bring the young humpback to grief. Don't they depend on a compass lodged in the salt-flooded folds of the brain, some delicate musical mechanism to navigate their true course? How many ways, in our century's late iron hours, might we have led him to disaster? That, in those days, was how I'd come to see the world: dark upon dark, any sense of spirit an embattled flame sparked against wind-driven rain till pain snuffed it out. I thought, This is what experience gives us , and I moved carefully through my life while I waited. . . Enough, it wasn't that way at all. The whale —exuberant, proud maybe, playful, like the early music of Beethoven— cruised the footings for smelts clustered near the pylons in mercury flocks. He (do I have the gender right?) would negotiate the rusty hulls of the Portuguese fishing boats —Holy Infant, Little Marie— with what could only be read as pleasure, coming close then diving, trailing on the surface big spreading circles until he'd breach, thrilling us with the release of pressured breath, and the bulk of his sleek young head —a wet black leather sofa already barnacled with ghostly lice— and his elegant and unlikely mouth, and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes, and the way his broad flippers resembled a pair of clownish gloves or puppet hands, looming greenish white beneath the bay's clouded sheen. When he had consumed his pleasure of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps, in his own admired performance, he swam out the harbor mouth, into the Atlantic. And though grief has seemed to me itself a dim, salt suspension in which I've moved, blind thing, day by day, through the wreckage, barely aware of what I stumbled toward, even I couldn't help but look at the way this immense figure graces the dark medium, and shines so: heaviness which is no burden to itself. What did you think, that joy was some slight thing?

Written by Barry Tebb | Letters To Friends I Eddie Linden Dear Eddie we’ve not met Except upon the written page And at your age the wonder Is that you write at all When so many have gone under Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours Blunder following blunder Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor From my chained metropolitan moorings, O hyaline March morning with Leeds At its thrusting best, the thirsty beasts Of night quenched as the furnaces Of Hunslet where Hudswell Clarke’s locos Rust in their skeletal sheds, rails skewed To graveyards platforms and now instead Skyscrapers circle the city, cranes, aeroplanes, Electric trains but even they cannot hinder Branches bursting with semen Seraphic cloud sanctuaries shunting Us homeward to the beckoning moors. II Brenda Williams Leeds voices soothe the turbulence ‘Ey’ ‘sithee’ and ‘love’, lastingly lilt From cradle to grave, from backstreet On the social, our son, beat his way To Eton, Balliol, to Calcatta’s Shantiniketan And all the way back to a locked ward. While I in the meantime fondly fiddled With rhyme and unreason, publishing pamphlets And Leeds Poetry Weekly while under the bane Of his tragic illness, poet and mother, You were driven from pillar to post By the taunting yobbery of your family And the crass insensitivity of wild therapy To the smoking dark of despair, Locked in your flat in the Abbey Road With seven cats and poetry. O stop and strop your bladed darkness On the rock of ages while plangent tollings Mock your cradled rockings, knock by knock. III Debjani Chatterjee In these doom-laden days You are steady as a pilot nursing tired ships homeward Through churning seas Where grey gulls scream Forlornly and for ever. I am the red-neck, Bear-headed blaster Shifting sheer rock To rape the ore of poetry’s plunder Or bulldozing trees to glean mines of silver While you sail serenely onward Ever the diplomat’s daughter Toujours de la politesse. IV Daisy Abey Daisy, dearest of all, safest And kindest, watcher and warner Of chaotic corners looming Round poetry’s boomerang bends I owe you most a letter While you are here beside me Patient as a miller waiting on wind To drive the great sails Through summer. When the muse takes over I am snatched from order and duty Blowing routine into a riot of going And coming, blind, backwards, tip Over ****, sea waves crashing in suburbia, Saturnalia in Sutton, headlines of mad poet Striding naked over moors, roaring "I am here I am waiting". V Jeremy Reed Niagaras of letters on pink sheets In sheaths of silver envelopes Mutually exchanged. I open your missives Like undressing a girl in my teens Undoing the flap like a recalcitrant Bra strap, the letters stiff as nipples While I stroke the creviced folds Of amber and mauve and lick As I stick stamps like the ******** Of a reluctant virgin, urgent for Defloration and the pulse of ******.

Written by Ruth Padel | Night (published on BLINKING EYE, http://www.blinking-eye.co.uk/writer/padel2.html ) Then spoke the thunder, shattering the looming blackness of our national life. The rumble that breaks a spell of the dry season – Saro-Wiwa, "The Storm Breaks" Does a zebra foal dream? Head lower, lower under lenticular dark cloud, he drags harlequin fetlocks, porcelain quails' egg hooflets through pimpling dust, slower, slower through the silver rainbow night, this soot and fester cellar-lighting, electricity of the blue and evil eye. Night ringed with eyes, gutter-glow of new-soused theatre, hyena, leopard, caracal (that caramel cat with ear tufts, anxious to feed her cubs) watching the lame foal weakened by drought. All you know is, that you don't know, and are afraid. Moonshadow where the big rocks laugh apart. Predator-senses. Cilia. Heat detectors crowd this long auditorium, segment after segment of the midnight shuffle-plains. They radar in on bodies, fluids, molecules of flesh that do not know they glow, they draw. Let's give him one dream-memory, a zebra wish fulfilled in dazing plod, some sheer green wall of sugarcane. And look - he's made it through into the bleach and blaze, rose curdling over indigo and lard, this granult scar of dawn. One more dawn nearer the water. Sky blood-taggled, blood-tufted, rushes over him like a white bowl at the end of things, the little safe horizon of a pilot's dial, an inventory of therapeutic gems.

Written by Emily Brontë | Come Walk With Me Come, walk with me, There's only thee To bless my spirit now - We used to love on winter nights To wander through the snow; Can we not woo back old delights? The clouds rush dark and wild They fleck with shade our mountain heights The same as long ago And on the horizon rest at last In looming masses piled; While moonbeams flash and fly so fast We scarce can say they smiled - Come walk with me, come walk with me; We were not once so few But Death has stolen our company As sunshine steals the dew - He took them one by one and we Are left the only two; So closer would my feelings twine Because they have no stay but thine - 'Nay call me not - it may not be Is human love so true? Can Friendship's flower droop on for years And then revive anew? No, though the soil be wet with tears, How fair soe'er it grew The vital sap once perished Will never flow again And surer than that dwelling dread, The narrow dungeon of the dead Time parts the hearts of men -'

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson | In Memoriam A. H. H. Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just. Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, thou. Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine. Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster. We are fools and slight; We mock thee when we do not fear: But help thy foolish ones to bear; Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. Forgive what seem'd my sin in me; What seem'd my worth since I began; For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee. Forgive my grief for one removed, Thy creature, whom I found so fair. I trust he lives in thee, and there I find him worthier to be loved. Forgive these wild and wandering cries, Confusions of a wasted youth; Forgive them where they fail in truth, And in thy wisdom make me wise. I I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. But who shall so forecast the years And find in loss a gain to match? Or reach a hand thro' time to catch The far-off interest of tears? Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd, Let darkness keep her raven gloss: Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, To dance with death, to beat the ground, Than that the victor Hours should scorn The long result of love, and boast, `Behold the man that loved and lost, But all he was is overworn.' II Old Yew, which graspest at the stones That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. The seasons bring the flower again, And bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee, the clock Beats out the little lives of men. O, not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom: And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee. III O Sorrow, cruel fellowship, O Priestess in the vaults of Death, O sweet and bitter in a breath, What whispers from thy lying lip? 'The stars,' she whispers, `blindly run; A web is wov'n across the sky; From out waste places comes a cry, And murmurs from the dying sun: 'And all the phantom, Nature, stands— With all the music in her tone, A hollow echo of my own,— A hollow form with empty hands.' And shall I take a thing so blind, Embrace her as my natural good; Or crush her, like a vice of blood, Upon the threshold of the mind? IV To Sleep I give my powers away; My will is bondsman to the dark; I sit within a helmless bark, And with my heart I muse and say: O heart, how fares it with thee now, That thou should'st fail from thy desire, Who scarcely darest to inquire, 'What is it makes me beat so low?' Something it is which thou hast lost, Some pleasure from thine early years. Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, That grief hath shaken into frost! Such clouds of nameless trouble cross All night below the darken'd eyes; With morning wakes the will, and cries, 'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.' V I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold: But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more. VI One writes, that `Other friends remain,' That `Loss is common to the race'— And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff well meant for grain. That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more: Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break. O father, wheresoe'er thou be, Who pledgest now thy gallant son; A shot, ere half thy draught be done, Hath still'd the life that beat from thee. O mother, praying God will save Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow'd, His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud Drops in his vast and wandering grave. Ye know no more than I who wrought At that last hour to please him well; Who mused on all I had to tell, And something written, something thought; Expecting still his advent home; And ever met him on his way With wishes, thinking, `here to-day,' Or `here to-morrow will he come.' O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove, That sittest ranging golden hair; And glad to find thyself so fair, Poor child, that waitest for thy love! For now her father's chimney glows In expectation of a guest; And thinking `this will please him best,' She takes a riband or a rose; For he will see them on to-night; And with the thought her colour burns; And, having left the glass, she turns Once more to set a ringlet right; And, even when she turn'd, the curse Had fallen, and her future Lord Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford, Or kill'd in falling from his horse. O what to her shall be the end? And what to me remains of good? To her, perpetual maidenhood, And unto me no second friend. VII Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more— Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day. VIII A happy lover who has come To look on her that loves him well, Who 'lights and rings the gateway bell, And learns her gone and far from home; He saddens, all the magic light Dies off at once from bower and hall, And all the place is dark, and all The chambers emptied of delight: So find I every pleasant spot In which we two were wont to meet, The field, the chamber, and the street, For all is dark where thou art not. Yet as that other, wandering there In those deserted walks, may find A flower beat with rain and wind, Which once she foster'd up with care; So seems it in my deep regret, O my forsaken heart, with thee And this poor flower of poesy Which little cared for fades not yet. But since it pleased a vanish'd eye, I go to plant it on his tomb, That if it can it there may bloom, Or, dying, there at least may die. IX Fair ship, that from the Italian shore Sailest the placid ocean-plains With my lost Arthur's loved remains, Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er. So draw him home to those that mourn In vain; a favourable speed Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn. All night no ruder air perplex Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright As our pure love, thro' early light Shall glimmer on the dewy decks. Sphere all your lights around, above; Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow; Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now, My friend, the brother of my love; My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widow'd race be run; Dear as the mother to the son, More than my brothers are to me. X I hear the noise about thy keel; I hear the bell struck in the night: I see the cabin-window bright; I see the sailor at the wheel. Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife, And travell'd men from foreign lands; And letters unto trembling hands; And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life. So bring him; we have idle dreams: This look of quiet flatters thus Our home-bred fancies. O to us, The fools of habit, sweeter seems To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God; Than if with thee the roaring wells Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine; And hands so often clasp'd in mine, Should toss with tangle and with shells. XI Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only thro' the faded leaf The chestnut pattering to the ground: Calm and deep peace on this high world, And on these dews that drench the furze, And all the silvery gossamers That twinkle into green and gold: Calm and still light on yon great plain That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main: Calm and deep peace in this wide air, These leaves that redden to the fall; And in my heart, if calm at all, If any calm, a calm despair: Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, And waves that sway themselves in rest, And dead calm in that noble breast Which heaves but with the heaving deep. XII Lo, as a dove when up she springs To bear thro' Heaven a tale of woe, Some dolorous message knit below The wild pulsation of her wings; Like her I go; I cannot stay; I leave this mortal ark behind, A weight of nerves without a mind, And leave the cliffs, and haste away O'er ocean-mirrors rounded large, And reach the glow of southern skies, And see the sails at distance rise, And linger weeping on the marge, And saying; `Comes he thus, my friend? Is this the end of all my care?' And circle moaning in the air: 'Is this the end? Is this the end?' And forward dart again, and play About the prow, and back return To where the body sits, and learn That I have been an hour away. XIII Tears of the widower, when he sees A late-lost form that sleep reveals, And moves his doubtful arms, and feels Her place is empty, fall like these; Which weep a loss for ever new, A void where heart on heart reposed; And, where warm hands have prest and closed, Silence, till I be silent too. Which weep the comrade of my choice, An awful thought, a life removed, The human-hearted man I loved, A Spirit, not a breathing voice. Come, Time, and teach me, many years, I do not suffer in a dream; For now so strange do these things seem, Mine eyes have leisure for their tears; My fancies time to rise on wing, And glance about the approaching sails, As tho' they brought but merchants' bales, And not the burthen that they bring. XIV If one should bring me this report, That thou hadst touch'd the land to-day, And I went down unto the quay, And found thee lying in the port; And standing, muffled round with woe, Should see thy passengers in rank Come stepping lightly down the plank, And beckoning unto those they know; And if along with these should come The man I held as half-divine; Should strike a sudden hand in mine, And ask a thousand things of home; And I should tell him all my pain, And how my life had droop'd of late, And he should sorrow o'er my state And marvel what possess'd my brain; And I perceived no touch of change, No hint of death in all his frame, But found him all in all the same, I should not feel it to be strange. XV To-night the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day: The last red leaf is whirl'd away, The rooks are blown about the skies; The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd, The cattle huddled on the lea; And wildly dash'd on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world: And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass, I scarce could brook the strain and stir That makes the barren branches loud; And but for fear it is not so, The wild unrest that lives in woe Would dote and pore on yonder cloud That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a labouring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire. XVI What words are these have falle'n from me? Can calm despair and wild unrest Be tenants of a single breast, Or sorrow such a changeling be? Or cloth she only seem to take The touch of change in calm or storm; But knows no more of transient form In her deep self, than some dead lake That holds the shadow of a lark Hung in the shadow of a heaven? Or has the shock, so harshly given, Confused me like the unhappy bark That strikes by night a craggy shelf, And staggers blindly ere she sink? And stunn'd me from my power to think And all my knowledge of myself; And made me that delirious man Whose fancy fuses old and new, And flashes into false and true, And mingles all without a plan? XVII Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze Compell'd thy canvas, and my prayer Was as the whisper of an air To breathe thee over lonely seas. For I in spirit saw thee move Thro' circles of the bounding sky, Week after week: the days go by: Come quick, thou bringest all I love. Henceforth, wherever thou may'st roam, My blessing, like a line of light, Is on the waters day and night, And like a beacon guards thee home. So may whatever tempest mars Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark; And balmy drops in summer dark Slide from the bosom of the stars. So kind an office hath been done, Such precious relics brought by thee; The dust of him I shall not see Till all my widow'd race be run. XVIII 'Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand Where he in English earth is laid, And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land. 'Tis little; but it looks in truth As if the quiet bones were blest Among familiar names to rest And in the places of his youth. Come then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep, And come, whatever loves to weep, And hear the ritual of the dead. Ah yet, ev'n yet, if this might be, I, falling on his faithful heart, Would breathing thro' his lips impart The life that almost dies in me; That dies not, but endures with pain, And slowly forms the firmer mind, Treasuring the look it cannot find, The words that are not heard again. XIX The Danube to the Severn gave The darken'd heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave. There twice a day the Severn fills; The salt sea-water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye, And makes a silence in the hills. The Wye is hush'd nor moved along, And hush'd my deepest grief of all, When fill'd with tears that cannot fall, I brim with sorrow drowning song. The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls; My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then. XX The lesser griefs that may be said, That breathe a thousand tender vows, Are but as servants in a house Where lies the master newly dead; Who speak their feeling as it is, And weep the fulness from the mind: `It will be hard,' they say, `to find Another service such as this.' My lighter moods are like to these, That out of words a comfort win; But there are other griefs within, And tears that at their fountain freeze; For by the hearth the children sit Cold in that atmosphere of Death, And scarce endure to draw the breath, Or like to noiseless phantoms flit; But open converse is there none, So much the vital spirits sink To see the vacant chair, and think, 'How good! how kind! and he is gone.' XXI I sing to him that rests below, And, since the grasses round me wave, I take the grasses of the grave, And make them pipes whereon to blow. The traveller hears me now and then, And sometimes harshly will he speak: `This fellow would make weakness weak, And melt the waxen hearts of men.' Another answers, `Let him be, He loves to make parade of pain That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy.' A third is wroth: `Is this an hour For private sorrow's barren song, When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power? 'A time to sicken and to swoon, When Science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon?' Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust: I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing: And one is glad; her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged; And one is sad; her note is changed, Because her brood is stol'n away. XXII The path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Thro' four sweet years arose and fell, From flower to flower, from snow to snow: And we with singing cheer'd the way, And, crown'd with all the season lent, From April on to April went, And glad at heart from May to May: But where the path we walk'd began To slant the fifth autumnal slope, As we descended following Hope, There sat the Shadow fear'd of man; Who broke our fair companionship, And spread his mantle dark and cold, And wrapt thee formless in the fold, And dull'd the murmur on thy lip, And bore thee where I could not see Nor follow, tho' I walk in haste, And think, that somewhere in the waste The Shadow sits and waits for me. XXIII Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut, Or breaking into song by fits, Alone, alone, to where he sits, The Shadow cloak'd from head to foot, Who keeps the keys of all the creeds, I wander, often falling lame, And looking back to whence I came, Or on to where the pathway leads; And crying, How changed from where it ran Thro' lands where not a leaf was dumb; But all the lavish hills would hum The murmur of a happy Pan: When each by turns was guide to each, And Fancy light from Fancy caught, And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech; And all we met was fair and good, And all was good that Time could bring, And all the secret of the Spring Moved in the chambers of the blood; And many an old philosophy On Argive heights divinely sang, And round us all the thicket rang To many a flute of Arcady. XXIV And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say? The very source and fount of Day Is dash'd with wandering isles of night. If all was good and fair we met, This earth had been the Paradise It never look'd to human eyes Since our first Sun arose and set. And is it that the haze of grief Makes former gladness loom so great? The lowness of the present state, That sets the past in this relief? Or that the past will always win A glory from its being far; And orb into the perfect star We saw not, when we moved therein? XXV I know that this was Life,—the track Whereon with equal feet we fared; And then, as now, the day prepared The daily burden for the back. But this it was that made me move As light as carrier-birds in air; I loved the weight I had to bear, Because it needed help of Love: Nor could I weary, heart or limb, When mighty Love would cleave in twain The lading of a single pain, And part it, giving half to him. XXVI Still onward winds the dreary way; I with it; for I long to prove No lapse of moons can canker Love, Whatever fickle tongues may say. And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the moulder'd tree, And towers fall'n as soon as built— Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn. XXVII I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods: I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time, Unfetter'd by the sense of crime, To whom a conscience never wakes; Nor, what may count itself as blest, The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest. I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Written by Robert William Service | Carry On It's easy to fight when everything's right, And you're mad with the thrill and the glory; It's easy to cheer when victory's near, And wallow in fields that are gory. It's a different song when everything's wrong, When you're feeling infernally mortal; When it's ten against one, and hope there is none, Buck up, little soldier, and chortle: Carry on! Carry on! There isn't much punch in your blow. You're glaring and staring and hitting out blind; You're muddy and bloody, but never you mind. Carry on! Carry on! You haven't the ghost of a show. It's looking like death, but while you've a breath, Carry on, my son! Carry on! And so in the strife of the battle of life It's easy to fight when you're winning; It's easy to slave, and starve and be brave, When the dawn of success is beginning. But the man who can meet despair and defeat With a cheer, there's the man of God's choosing; The man who can fight to Heaven's own height Is the man who can fight when he's losing. Carry on! Carry on! Things never were looming so black. But show that you haven't a cowardly streak, And though you're unlucky you never are weak. Carry on! Carry on! Brace up for another attack. It's looking like hell, but -- you never can tell: Carry on, old man! Carry on! There are some who drift out in the deserts of doubt, And some who in brutishness wallow; There are others, I know, who in piety go Because of a Heaven to follow. But to labour with zest, and to give of your best, For the sweetness and joy of the giving; To help folks along with a hand and a song; Why, there's the real sunshine of living. Carry on! Carry on! Fight the good fight and true; Believe in your mission, greet life with a cheer; There's big work to do, and that's why you are here. Carry on! Carry on! Let the world be the better for you; And at last when you die, let this be your cry: Carry on, my soul! Carry on!

Written by C K Williams | Tar The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours. All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building, and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to watch them as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains. After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall, we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident, the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order. Surely we suspect now we're being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers, setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking. I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrow- ingly dangerous. The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant. When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles. Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs, a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it, before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside. In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls, it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles, the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls. When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails, work gloves clinging like Br'er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip, the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shim- mers and mirages. Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us. However much we didn't want to, however little we would do about it, we'd understood: we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday. Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an at- mosphere as unrelenting as rock, would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions. I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest, the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so. I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool. I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Sus- quehanna at those looming stacks. But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, cling- ing like starlings beneath the eaves. Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson | In Memoriam A. H. H.: 15. To-night the winds begin to rise To-night the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day: The last red leaf is whirl'd away, The rooks are blown about the skies; The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd, The cattle huddled on the lea; And wildly dash'd on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world: And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass, I scarce could brook the strain and stir That makes the barren branches loud; And but for fear it is not so, The wild unrest that lives in woe Would dote and pore on yonder cloud That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a labouring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire.

Written by Robert William Service | Portent Courage mes gars: La guerre est proche. I plant my little plot of beans, I sit beneath my cyprus tree; I do not know what trouble means, I cultivate tranquillity . . . But as to-day my walk I made In all serenity and cheer, I saw cut in an agave blade: "Courage, my comrades, war is near!" Seward I went, my feet were slow, Awhile I dowsed upon the shore; And then I roused with fear for lo! I saw six grisly ships of war. A grim, grey line of might and dread Against the skyline looming sheer: With horror to myself I said: "Courage, my comrades, war is near!" I saw my cottage on the hill With rambling roses round the door; It was so peaceful and so still I sighed . . . and then it was no more. A flash of flame, a rubble heap; I cried aloud with woe and fear . . . And wok myself from troubled sleep - My home was safe, war was not near. Oh, I am old, my step is frail, My carcase bears a score of scars, And as I climbed my homeward trail Sadly I thought of other wars. And when that agave leaf I saw With vicious knife I made a blear Of words clean-cut into the raw: "Courage, my comrades, war is near!" Who put hem there I do not know - One of these rabid reds, no doubt; But I for freedom struck my blow, With bitter blade I scraped them out. There now, said I, I will forget, And smoke my pipe and drink my beer - Yet in my mind these words were set: "Courage, my comrades, war is near!" "Courage, my comrades, war is near!" I hear afar its hateful drums; Its horrid din assails my ear: I hope I die before it comes. . . . Yet as into the town I go, And listen to the rabble cheer, I think with heart of weary woe: War is not coming - WAR IS HERE.