Best Tennyson Poems
Deep as first love,
and wild as all regret -
Alfred Lord Tennyson
There is an aching in the heart
slipping into tears that burn and tear apart
every fiber of your being
so that the eyes are no longer seeing.
Each look was just pretend
knowing well how love would end
and there deep in the hallowed halls of time
well I knew, you wouldn't always be mine.
A somber memory paints
the heartthrob emotions making youth faint
delirious with love and sensual feelings
enough to send two bodies reeling.
Shadows lurk easing back and forth
assured each struggle for their own worth
there in that selfish centered need
one would follow and the other lead.
Just a moment held
as lovers succumb to love's spell
that quickly fades and disappears
with hearts held back by fear.
There in the shadows, each one alone will walk
their first love slipped away without talk
and futures die in the dream's regret
but it is a memory none ever forget.
Joseph May contest
Lines to awake the muse
3/1/20
A poet is a musician
The instrument he/she plays are words
The heart of a musician is the essence of song
So when Lord Alfred Tennyson defined
Poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty”
He felt, he heard, he composed the internal song
Presenting sound and content
In a style of it’s own
Creating mood inspiring a view
Painting a phrase a cliche or two
It is music in the mind’s ear
Best poems are timeless text is clear
Be they transformed by languages years
Great poems live on
External life’s future peers
It’s just like an intellectuallist
to tear creation from its little nest of stone,
thinking only if it rests in his hand,
if he can see all its white veins
will he grasp its mysteries.
Maybe this is why he knows
Death
so well,
and God so little.
Who, wanting a lover, seizes it out of life,
and lays its corpse in a tender repose,
trying to fathom the truth of what it means to smile?
The smile the autopsy leaves is no mystery.
A flower in a crannied wall
is a mystery
no more for the taking
than laughter.
Posted March 4, 2020
For Craig’s Flower in the Crannied Wall contest
Wonders of the world abound
on our earthly stomping ground,
in the seven seas profound,
midst the heavens round us wound.
Images from reaches vast
by astronomers amassed
show in varicolored cast,
cosmic glories unsurpassed,
stories of the great immense,
begging questions why and whence,
scenes stelliferously dense,
bringing past to present tense.
Oh how tantalizing to
lose oneself in starry view
of galactic vision new
where a poet’s words ring true!
Tennyson’s ‘Far--Far—Away’,
penned for Music’s haunting play
with the sounds the words convey
as they whisper, swing and sway,
tells of ‘far’ from past long gone,
murmur from ‘his own life’s dawn’?
breath where ‘doors of death’ go on
through an open curtain drawn?
Whether time or space be meant,
or spacetime together bent,
still, whatever sense is lent,
far’s remote in its intent.
After sunset’s crimson blaze
we may raise a dreamy gaze
in escape from troubled days
to celestial splendors praise.
Will our search of cosmic sphere
teach us to esteem what’s here?
Oft stargazers too I fear
must look far to see the near.
~ Harley White
Ring Out, Wild Bells, to the Wild Sky
(Ode to Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Fair son of England whom I write
of saw not well; thus short of sight,
formed lines that in his head would lie.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild Sky.
Those lines (deep thoughts) - once written down -
rang out like church bells through a town
or birds, which to the heavens fly.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
Yes, lofty verse and lyric sound
could touch those rooted to the ground
and make a nation’s royalty sigh!
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
Victorian inside his soul,
he also played a modern role -
He saw man’s plight and questioned why.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
Poet Laureate too was he
who penned a famous elegy
for his young friend so young to die:
“Ring Out, Wild Bells” (to the wild sky)
By old age, he had crushed his fears,
outlasting many poet peers.
To honor him, I can but try. . .
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
For Dr. Ram Mehta's Contest on
"Ring out wild bells to the wild sky"
Assailed upon all sides; trapped, like a rat without his cheese.
Though I wore quite fancy shoes, there were no socks upon my feet,
When I fought the heathens and, met defeat, at the Pillar Of Muhamete.
Through a wall of living flesh I hacked; my trusty hatchet, my only tool.
On a bloody muddy Monday morning, before the Temple of Kabul.
Great green spiders big as tanks, did we ride to meet enemy ranks,
And the sky was the hue of lemons, as we made war on the Plains of Singahlee.
When the cannons melted, I said "chuck it", then with a broomstick and a bucket,
Did I storm the castle of the Great Caliph. With a cabin boy creeping , at my knee.
With a lantern strapped to my head, I broached the tower gate to set the captives free!
When it seemed our lines would crack, I urged the regiment to the attack;
Our war wagons pulled by eight foot frogs, imported from the gates of hell.
When bullets ran low, we threw rocks; til at last we waved our members.
To show ourselves unafraid, we stipped to aprons our mums had made,
Then went raging down the hillsides, with a shrieking girlish yell.
One Bullock Pete he died that day; Big Dick Willie; hewed in twain in the fray.
But the blue balls boys of Bingham held the line! The blood flowed like cheap wine.
Smoke and screams filled the air, like cheap perfume in a whore's lair.
Amidst the fire and the smoke, I did a softshoe and told a joke.
And an old vaudeville routine nearly saved the day on that battlefield afar.
We ran like possums through the trees, In our boots and BVDs.
We may have lost the bloody battle, but we won the flipping war!
From Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem In Memoriam:27, 1850:
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.
From Eileen M Ghali's Monoku in Poetry Soup: August 6, 2014
It's better NOT to have loved and lost than always to remember a paradise gone.
Dare I shed this skin, and heart and bone
neath this hollow shell, where the ecstasy of life
though death dwells,
a season for all time;
they pass as sand through the hourglass,
dripping down to melted months,
I feel as the slitted urn,
eased to deathly mirth
Be I that fain patron of death ---
that austere table set for my invincible demise,
I cry as a desert blaze;
a lament disguised in the throes of eve,
in the time of nightingales I do sing;
and whipporwills rejoice
(in lofty perches so devine)
a final tear of my leaving
Our graves have been well prepared,
and we all know this well ---
those old days shall not return,
with it those pink morns of youth,
and the bitter-sweet of graying midlife ---
the eases of eve await ever still;
we move towards night....
to the bitter pill of midnite ---
'O midnite!
you chime in my soul with the rooster's call!
Prepare the hearse of life,
and roll it to the mountainside;
in the foothills I do sleep.....
and upon the mounts where the eagles scream,
where the vales awake,
and the Lillie's surmise a harvest of their age;
arise with me 'O Peace,
for it is to the heavens I do ride,
should I have wings as eagles ---
gliding swiftly do I fly;
yet my feathers shall be plucked,
and flight jostled ---
til,
leaving no regrets,
no evil,
fretting what I left behind,
a bliss eternal
‘ Lord Alfred Tennyson … ’ (Classical-Tribute) 62nd Senryu
Tennyson Thundered
‘ The Charge Of The Light Brigade ’
Salutes … Six-Hundred
How many children can say they
Enjoyed Tennsyon and real
hot chocolate----
Mrs. Beck's dark Hershey's,
Melted into milk, cream, and sugar?
Together at last-----
Tennyson and chocolate.
As you handed me the cup, Mrs. Beck,
Did you see that it was full
of chocolate phrases,
Of an early love of Alfred, L.T?
But, to rush home, then,
To share, was not to be.
As I sink into the last lines of
"Break, Break, Break,"
"But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me,"
I now raise a cup of Tennyson
and chocolate
For the children who have been lost,
And had their hearts shattered
On the cold, grey stones
Of a parent's despair.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
When all was certainly said and done,
Wrote “Better to have loved and lost…,”
Perhaps that was the bar he crossed.
written October 12, 2021
MY PLEA - a Tennyson Phrasis
By this still hearth I will drink
life to the lees.Much I have
known and seen..myself not least.
I am part of all that I have met,
yet how dull it is to pause to make
an end without this plea to thee.
From the eternal silence,something more..
a bringer of new things beyond the
utmost bound of human thought.
Come my friends,strive and find,'tis not
too late o seek a newer world.
A Christian Evangelical Phrasis inspired by some words in Ulyses by Tennyson
A Phrasis is a structured prose verse collaboration where the poet uses selected phrases of another writer’s (out of copyright) words to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,(the word phrasis is Greek for phrase). x
You may hear me recite this phrasis and much of my PS poetry on youtube under my pen name ichthyschiro
The Charge of Boris's Parliamentary Cohort of three hundred lawmakers
I
Forward the light brigade!
Was there a dude dismayed?
Though most should have known
Cameron had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply!
Theirs not to reason why!
Theirs but to do or die!
Spurning the fear of Death
rode the three hundred.
II
Farage to the right of them,
Corbyn to the left of them.
Bannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered.
Stormed at by the press,
Onward they rode in stress
Into the wilderness,
Oh, what an awful mess!
Rode the three hundred.
IV
Can ever their great deed fade?
How high that price they paid!
All the world wondered.
Praise to the charge they made?
Praise to the Light Brigade?
Intrepid three hundred!
Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson
with tetrameter(ABBA) had much fun
Gifted with wordplay he was blest
'In Memorium' at his best
Alfred Tennyson was created a Lord
but his poetry ever strikes a chord
He suffered an emotional blow
when fellow poet-rebel.Hallam was laid low