Freedom

Love

Life

Nature

Death

Friendship

Inspirational

Heartbreak

Sadness

Family

Hope

Happiness

Loss

War

Dreams

Spirituality

Courage

Freedom

Identity

Betrayal

Loneliness

Page 60 of 1676

If" And "Perhaps."

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Oh tidings of freedom! oh accents of hope!
    Waft, waft them, ye zephyrs, to Erin's blue sea,
And refresh with their sounds every son of the Pope,
    From Dingle-a-cooch to far Donaghadee.

"If mutely the slave will endure and obey,
    "Nor clanking his fetters nor breathing his pains,
"His masters perhaps at some far distant day
    "May think (tender tyrants!) of loosening his chains."

Wise "if" and "perhaps!"--precious salve for our wounds,
    If he who would rule thus o'er manacled mutes,
Could check the free spring-tide of Mind that resounds,
    Even now at his feet, like the sea at Canute's.

But, no, 'tis in vain--the grand impulse is given--
    Man knows his high Charter, and knowing will cla...

Thomas Moore

Moon Song

A child saw in the morning skies
The dissipated-looking moon,
And opened wide her big blue eyes,
And cried: "Look, look, my lost balloon!"
And clapped her rosy hands with glee:
"Quick, mother! Bring it back to me."

A poet in a lilied pond
Espied the moon's reflected charms,
And ravished by that beauty blonde,
Leapt out to clasp her in his arms.
And as he'd never learnt to swim,
Poor fool! that was the end of him.

A rustic glimpsed amid the trees
The bluff moon caught as in a snare.
"They say it do be made of cheese,"
Said Giles, "and that a chap bides there. . . .
That Blue Boar ale be strong, I vow -
The lad's a-winkin' at me now."

Two lovers watched the new moon hold
The old moon in her bright embrace.
Said she: "There's...

Robert William Service

Winter-Store

Subtly conscious, all awake,
Let us clear our eyes, and break
Through the cloudy chrysalis,
See the wonder as it is.
Down a narrow alley, blind,
Touch and vision, heart and mind;
Turned sharply inward, still we plod,
Till the calmly smiling god
Leaves us, and our spirits grow
More thin, more acrid, as we go.
Creeping by the sullen wall,
We forego the power to see,
The threads that bind us to the All,
God or the Immensity;
Whereof on the eternal road
Man is but a passing mode.

Too blind we are, too little see
Of the magic pageantry,
Every minute, every hour,
From the cloudflake to the flower,
Forever old, forever strange,
Issuing in perpetual change
From the rainbow gates of Time.

But he who through this common air...

Archibald Lampman

Springfield Magical

    In this, the City of my Discontent,
    Sometimes there comes a whisper from the grass,
    "Romance, Romance - is here.    No Hindu town
    Is quite so strange.    No Citadel of Brass
    By Sinbad found, held half such love and hate;
    No picture-palace in a picture-book
    Such webs of Friendship, Beauty, Greed and Fate!"

    In this, the City of my Discontent,
    Down from the sky, up from the smoking deep
    Wild legends new and old burn round my bed
    While trees and grass and men are wrapped in sleep.
    Angels come down, with Christmas in their hearts,
    Gentle, whimsical, laughing, heaven-sent;
    And, for a day, fair Peace have given me
    In this, the City of my Discontent!

Vachel Lindsay

You Felons On Trial In Courts

You felons on trial in courts;
You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins, chaind and hand-cuffd with iron;
Who am I, too, that I am not on trial, or in prison?
Me, ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chaind with iron, or my ankles with iron?

You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs, or obscene in your rooms,
Who am I, that I should call you more obscene than myself?

O culpable!
I acknowledge, I exposé!
(O admirers! praise not me! compliment not me! you make me wince,
I see what you do not, I know what you do not.)

Inside these breast-bones I lie smutchd and choked;
Beneath this face that appears so impassive, hells tides continually run;
Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me;
I walk with delinquents with passionate ...

Walt Whitman

My Castle In Spain.

There was never a castle seen
    So fair as mine in Spain:
It stands embowered in green,
    Crowning the gentle slope
Of a hill by the Xenil's shore
And at eve its shade flaunts o'er
    The storied Vega plain,
And its towers are hid in the mists of Hope;
    And I toil through years of pain
    Its glimmering gates to gain.

In visions wild and sweet
Sometimes its courts I greet:
    Sometimes in joy its shining halls
I tread with favoured feet;
But never my eyes in the light of day
    Were blest with its ivied walls,
Where the marble white and the granite gray
Turn gold alike when the sunbeams play,
    When the soft day dimly falls.

I know in its dusky rooms
    Are treasures rich and rare;
The spoil of Eastern looms,<...

John Hay

Greater Britain

Our hearts were not set on fighting,
    We did not pant for the fray,
And whatever wrongs need righting,
    We would not have met that way.
But the way that has opened before us
    Leads on thro' a blood-red field;
And we swear by the great God o'er us,
    We will die, but we will not yield.

The battle is not of our making,
    And war was never our plan;
Yet, all that is sweet forsaking,
    We march to it, man by man.
It is either to smite, or be smitten,
    There's no other choice to-day;
And we live, as befits the Briton,
    Or we die, as the Briton may.

We were not fashioned for cages,
    Or to feed from a keeper's hand;
Our strength which has grown thro' ages
    Is the strength of a slave-free land.
We cannot kneel...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A Lament.

        I.

White moons may come, white moons may go,
She sleeps where wild wood blossoms blow,
Nor knows she of the rosy June,
Star-silver flowers o'er her strewn,
The pearly paleness of the moon, -
    Alas! how should she know!


        II.

The downy moth at evening comes
To suck thin honey from wet blooms;
Long, lazy clouds that swimming high
Brood white about the western sky,
Grow red as molten iron and lie
    Above the fragrant glooms.


        III.

Rare odors of the weed and fern,
Dry whisp'rings of dim leaves that turn,
A sound of hidden waters lone
Frothed bubbling down the streaming stone,
And now a wood-dove's plaintive moan
    Drift from the bushy burne.


        IV.
...

Madison Julius Cawein

In Trafalgar Square.

The stars shone faint through the smoky blue;
    The church-bells were ringing;
Three girls, arms laced, were passing through,
    Tramping and singing.

Their heads were bare; their short skirts swung
    As they went along;
Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung
    Their defiant song.

It was not too clean, their feminine lay,
    But it thrilled me quite
With its challenge to task-master villainous day
    And infamous night,

With its threat to the robber rich, the proud,
    The respectable free.
And I laughed and shouted to them aloud,
    And they shouted to me!

"Girls, that's the shout, the shout we shall utter
    When with rifles and spades,
We stand, with the old Red...

Francis William Lauderdale Adams

The Madness Of King Goll
I sat on cushioned otter-skin:
My word was law from Ith to Emain,
And shook at Inver Amergin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,
And drove tumult and war away
From girl and boy and man and beast;
The fields grew fatter day by day,
The wild fowl of the air increased;
And every ancient Ollave said,
While he bent down his fading head.
"He drives away the Northern cold.'
i[They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.]
I sat and mused and drank sweet wine;
A herdsman came from inland valleys,
Crying, the pirates drove his swine
To fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.
I called my battle-breaking men
And my loud brazen battle-cars
From rolling vale and rivery glen;
And under the blinking of the stars
Fell on the...
William Butler Yeats

Wanderlust
Who administers to my needs?

Is it the dandelion, so ant-encrusted, that
yellow pollen dangles from a shiny abdomen
suggestive of some actor's
smeared and garish make-up?

Or the cicada's song,
difficult to describe,
laundering thick summer heat?

Perhaps, then, the Red Admiral butterfly
especially active at the close of day and drawn
to wooden lawn-furniture or the exposed human limb?

If none of these
breathes vigour or tonic
through my nostrils,
what of tubs of fresh water?

Take pea-pods for crude, rudimentary boats
and children as make-shift sailors,
then they both shall spy the secrets of seas.
Bold harbours will be their cues,
astrola...
Paul Cameron Brown

To E.M., A Ballad Of Nursery Rhyme.
Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.

No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.

One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument.

May sudden justice overtake
And snap the froward pen,
That old and palsied poets shake
Against the minds of men.

Blasphemers trusting to hold caught
In far-flung webs of ink,
The utmost ends of human thought
Till nothing's left to think.

But may the gift of heavenly peace
And glory for all tim...
Robert von Ranke Graves

Meditations. (Translations From The Hebrew Poets Of Medaeval Spain.)
Forget thine anguish,
Vexed heart, again.
Why shouldst thou languish,
With earthly pain?
The husk shall slumber,
Bedded in clay
Silent and sombre,
Oblivion's prey!
But, Spirit immortal,
Thou at Death's portal,
Tremblest with fear.
If he caress thee,
Curse thee or bless thee,
Thou must draw near,
From him the worth of thy works to hear.

Why full of terror,
Compassed with error,
Trouble thy heart,
For thy mortal part?
The soul flies home -
The corpse is dumb.
Of all thou didst have,
Follows naught to the grave.
Thou fliest thy nest,
Swift as a bird to thy place of rest.

What avail grief and fasting,
Where nothing is lasting?
Pomp, domination,
Become tribulation.
In a health-...
Emma Lazarus

Winter - The Fourth Pastoral, Or Daphne
Lycidas

Thyrsis, the music of that murm'ring spring,
Is not so mournful as the strains you sing.
Nor rivers winding thro' the vales below,
So sweetly warble, or so smoothly flow.
Now sleeping flocks on their soft fleeces lie,
The moon, serene in glory, mounts the sky,
Wile silent birds forget their tuneful lays,
Oh sing of Daphne's fate, and Daphne's praise!

Thyrsis

Behold the groves that shine with silver frost,
Their beauty wither'd, and their verdure lost.
Here shall I try the sweet Alexis' strain,
That call'd the list'ning Dryads to the plain?
Thames heard the numbers as he flow'd along,
And bade his willows learn the moving song.

Lycidas

So may kind rains their vital moisture yield,
And swell the future harvest of t...
Alexander Pope

What We Needed.
What does our country need? Not armies standing
With sabres gleaming ready for the fight.
Not increased navies, skillful and commanding,
To bound the waters with an iron might.
Not haughty men with glutted purses trying
To purchase souls, and keep the power of place.
Not jeweled dolls with one another vieing
For palms of beauty, elegance and grace.

But we want women, strong of soul, yet lowly,
With that rare meekness, born of gentleness,
Women whose lives are pure and clean and holy,
The women whom all little children bless.
Brave, earnest women, helpful to each other,
With finest scorn for all things low and mean.
Women who hold the names of wife and mother,
Far nobler than the title of a Queen.

O these are they who...
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

To ----
I cannot write old verses here,
Dead things a thousand years away,
When all the life of the young year
Is in the summer day.

The roses make the world so sweet,
The bees, the birds have such a tune,
There's such a light and such a heat
And such a joy this June,

One must expand one's heart with praise,
And make the memory secure
Of sunshine and the woodland days
And summer twilights pure.

Oh listen rather! Nature's song
Comes from the waters, beating tides,
Green-margined rivers, and the throng
Of streams on mountain-sides.

So fair those water-spirits are,
Such happy strength their music fills,
Our joy shall be to wander far
And find them on the hills.
George MacDonald

Prometheus Or The Poet's Forethought
Of Prometheus, how undaunted
On Olympus' shining bastions
His audacious foot he planted,
Myths are told and songs are chanted,
Full of promptings and suggestions.

Beautiful is the tradition
Of that flight through heavenly portals,
The old classic superstition
Of the theft and the transmission
Of the fire of the Immortals!

First the deed of noble daring,
Born of heavenward aspiration,
Then the fire with mortals sharing,
Then the vulture,--the despairing
Cry of pain on crags Caucasian.

All is but a symbol painted
Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer;
Only those are crowned and sainted
Who with grief have been acquainted,
Making nations nobler, freer.

In their feverish exultations,
In thei...
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Two Stanzas
There was once a town, the inhabitants of which were so passionately fond of poetry, that if some weeks passed by without the appearance of any good new poems, they regarded such a poetic dearth as a public misfortune.

They used at such times to put on their worst clothes, to sprinkle ashes on their heads; and, assembling in crowds in the public squares, to shed tears and bitterly to upbraid the muse who had deserted them.

On one such inauspicious day, the young poet Junius came into a square, thronged with the grieving populace.

With rapid steps he ascended a forum constructed for this purpose, and made signs that he wished to recite a poem.

The lictors at once brandished their fasces. 'Silence! attention!' they shouted loudly, and the crowd was hushed in expectation.

'Friends! Comra...
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

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