Category: Regular poem

The Castaway
by William Cowper

Obscurest night involved the sky,
   The Atlantic billows roared,
When such a destined wretch as I,
   Washed headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left.

No braver chief could Albion boast
   Than he with whom he went,
Nor ever ship left Albion’s coast,
   With warmer wishes sent.
He loved them both, but both in vain,
Nor him beheld, nor her again.

Not long beneath the whelming  brine,   
   Expert to swim, he lay;
Nor soon he felt his strength decline,
   Or courage die away;
But waged with death a lasting strife,
Supported by despair of life.

He shouted: nor his friends had failed
   To check the vessel’s course,
But so the furious blast prevailed,
   That, pitiless perforce,
They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.

Some succour yet they could afford;
   And, such as storms allow,
The cask, the coop, the floated cord,
   Delayed not to bestow.
But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,
Whate’er they gave, should visit more.

Nor, cruel as it seemed, could he
   Their haste himself condemn,
Aware that flight, in such a sea,
   Alone could rescue them;
Yet bitter felt it still to die
Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

He long survives, who lives an hour
   In ocean, self-upheld;
And so long he, with unspent power,
   His destiny repelled;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried – Adieu!

At length, his transient respite past,
   His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in every blast,
   Could catch the sound no more.
For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.

No poet wept him: but the page
   Of narrative sincere,
That tells his name, his worth, his age,
   Is wet with Anson’s tear.
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.

I therefore purpose not, or dream,
   Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme
   A more enduring date:
But misery still delights to trace 
Its semblance in another’s case.

No voice divine the storm allayed,
   No light propitious shone;
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
   We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

A Thunderstorm in Town

She wore a ‘terra-cotta’ dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom’s dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more.

Thomas Hardy

Love’s Philosophy

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle –
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea –
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?

My love is a Theosophist
  And reads the Ramayana;
Her luncheon is a pot of tea,
  Her breakfast a banana.
She says that matter tends to clog
  The spirit-force behind it.
My love is a Theosophist,
  And very tough I find it.

My love is a Theosophist
  And wears no combinations;
She says they get her thought-urge weak
  And lower her vibrations.
She tells me flannel next the skin
  Impedes the astral motions.
My love is a Theosophist,
  And has the strangest notions.

My love is a Theosophist,
  And few things I deplore as
Sincerely as the thoughtless way
  She crabs her neighbours’ auras.
She sensed Miss Hope’s as bilious green,
  And got some quack to vet it.
My love is a Theosophist,
  And many folk regret it.

My love is a Theosophist,
  And though distinctly stouter
She moves on a more mental plane
  Than do the folks about her.
She moved into a potted plant
  Last week at Mrs Reece’s.
My love is a Theosophist,
  So I picked up the pieces.

My love is a Theosophist,
  And has an intimation
That she was Florence Nightingale
  In her last incarnation.
She senses me as Titus Oates,
  More Ape-man than Apollo,
My love is a Theosophist,
  And difficult to follow.

My love is a Theosophist,
  And does not seem to worry
If they forget to send the fish
  Or fail to cook the curry.
As my potatoes grow more burnt
  Her temper grows the sweeter.
My love is a Theosophist,
  And lives on Veeta Weeta.

My love is a Theosophist–
  Or, rather, is no longer;
For, though her Ego-urge was strong,
  The Cosmic Will as stronger.
While moving on the Higher Plane
  She moved into a lorry.
My love was a Theosophist,
  And really I’m not sorry.

Patrick Barrington

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable —
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen each, we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good-morrow, Mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Edna St Vincent Millay

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Incognita

Just for a space I met her –
  Just for a day in the train!
It began when she feared it would wet her,
  That tiniest spurtle of rain:
So we tucked a great rug in the sashes,
  And carefully padded the pane;
And I sorrow in sackcloth and ashes,
  Longing to do it again!

Then it grew when she begged me to reach her
  A dressing-case under the seat;
She was “really so tiny a creature,
  That she needed a stool for her feet.!”
Which was promptly arranged to her order
  With a care that was even minute,
And a glimpse – of an open- worked border,
  And a glance – of the fairyest boot.

Then it drooped, and revived at some hovels –
  “Were they houses for men or for pigs?”
Then it shifted to muscular novels,
  With a little digreesion on prigs:
She thought “Wives and Daughters” “so jolly”;
  “Had I read it?” She knew when I had,
Like the rest, I should dote upon “Molly”;
  And “poor Mrs Gaskell – how sad!”

“Loke Browning?” “But so-so.”  His proof lay
  “Too deep for her frivolous mood,
That preferredyour mere metrical souffle
  To the stronger poetical food;
Yet at times he was good – “as a tonic”;
  Was Tennyson writing just now?
And was this new poet Byronic,
  And clever, and naughty, or how?

Then we trifled with concerts and croquet,
  Then she daintily dusted her face;
Then she sprinkled herself with “Ess Bouquet”,
  Fished out from the foregoing case;
And we chattered of Gassier and Grisi,
  And voted Aunt Sally a bore;
Discussed if the tight rope were easy,
  Or Chopin much harder than Spohr.

And oh! The odd things that she quoted,
  With the prettiest possible look,
And the price of two buns that she noted
  In the prettiest possible book;
While her talk like a musical rillet
  Flashed on with the hours that flew,
And the carriage, her smile seemed to fill it
  With just enough summer – for Two.

Till at last in her corner, peeping
  From a nest of rugs and of furs,
With the white shut eyelids sleeping
  On those dangerous looks of hers,
She seemed like a snowdrop breaking,
  Not wholly alive nor dead,
But with one blind impulse making
  To the sounds of the spring overhead;

And I watched in the lamplights’s swerving
  The shade of the down-dropped lid,
And the lip-line’s delicate curving,
  Where a slumbering smile lay hid,
Till I longed that, rather than sever,
  The train should shriek into space,
And carry us onward – for ever –
  Me and that beautiful face.

But she suddenly woke in a fidget,
  With fears she was “nearly at home”,
And talk of a certain Aunt Bridget,
  Whom I mentally wished – well at Rome;
Got out at the very next station,
  Looking back with a merry bon soir,
Adding, too, to my utter vexation,
  A surplus, unkind Au Revoir.

So left me to muse on her graces,
  To doze and to muse, till I dreamed
That we sailed through the sunniest palces
  In a glorified galley, it seemed;
But the cabin was made of a carriage,
  And the ocean was Eau-de-Cologne,
And we split on a rock labelled MARRIAGE,
  And I woke, – as cold as a stone.

And that’s how I lost her – a jewel,
  Incognita – one in a crowd,
Not prudent enough to be cruel,
  Not worldly enough to be proud.
It was just a shut lid and its lashes,
  Just a few hours in a train,
And I sorrow in sackcloth and ashes,
  Longing to see her again.

Austin Dobson

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The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.

The chance of battle changes — so may all battle be;
I stole my lady bride from them, they stole her back from me.
I rent her from her red-roofed hall, I rode and saw arise,
More lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes.
She never loved me, never bent, never was less divine;
The sunset never loved me, the wind was never mine.
Was it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse?
Silence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress.
O you who drain the cup of life, O you who wear the crown,
You never loved a woman's smile as I have loved her frown.

 
The wind blew out from Bergen to the dawning of the day,
They ride and run with fifty spears to break and bar my way,
I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, —
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.

Know you what earth shall lose to-night, what rich uncounted loans,
What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones?
My loves in deep dim meadows, my ships that rode at ease,
Ruffling the purple plumage of strange and secret seas.
To see this fair earth as it is to me alone was given,
The blow that breaks my brow to-night shall break the dome of heaven.
The skies I saw, the trees I saw after no eyes shall see,
To-night I die the death of God; the stars shall die with me;
One sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet's breath:
You never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death.

G K Chesterton

(Written in 1901)

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We Have Been Here Before

I think I remember this moorland,
  The tower on the tip of the tor:
I feel in the distance another existence;
  I think I have been here before.

And I think you were sitting beside me
  In a fold in the face of the fell:
For Time at its work’ll go round in a circle,
  And what is befalling, befell.

“I have been here before!”  I asserted
  In a nook on the neck of the Nile.
I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,
  And you smiled, I remember your smile. 

I had the same sense of persistence
  On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the tepee the sound of a sleepy
  Pleistocene grunt.  It was you.

The past made a promise, before it
  Began to begone.
This limited gamut brings you again … damn it,
  How long has this got to go on?

Morris Bishop

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