ASIA POEMS

Jobson's Amen

"Blessed be the English and all their ways and works.
Cursed be the Infidels, Hereticks, and Turks!"
"Amen," quo' Jobson, "but where I used to lie
Was neither Candle, Bell nor Book to curse my brethren by,
.....

Rudyard Kipling

To My Mother

Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
.....

George Barker

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

Late, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts,
Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,

Wander'd back to living boyhood while I heard the curlews call,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Consolation

Mist clogs the sunshine.
Smoky dwarf houses
Hem me round everywhere;
A vague dejection
.....

Matthew Arnold

To Think Of Time

To think of time, of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!

Have you guess'd you yourself would not continue?
.....

Walt Whitman

The Pied Piper Of Hamelin

A Child's Story

Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
.....

Robert Browning

Hyperion: Book Ii

Just at the self-same beat of Time's wide wings
Hyperion slid into the rustled air,
And Saturn gain'd with Thea that sad place
Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn'd.
.....

John Keats

Humanitad

It is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn's gaudy livery whose gold
.....

Oscar Wilde

Salut Au Monde

O TAKE my hand, Walt Whitman!
Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!
Such join'd unended links, each hook'd to the next!
Each answering all--each sharing the earth with all.
.....

Walt Whitman

The Gathering Of The Brown-eyed

The brown eyes came from Asia, where all mystery is true,
Ere the masters of Soul Secrets dreamed of hazel, grey, and blue;
And the Brown Eyes came to Egypt, which is called the gypsiesâ?? home,
And the Brown Eyes went from Egypt and Jerusalem to Rome.
.....

Henry Lawson

A Manager's Perplexities

Were I a king in very truth,
And had a son - a guileless youth -
In probable succession;
To teach him patience, teach him tact,
.....

William Schwenck Gilbert

A Tale Of Two Cities

Where the sober-colored cultivator smiles
On his byles;
Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow
Come and go;
.....

Rudyard Kipling

To Buddha

Awake again in Asia, Lord of Peace,
Awake and preach, for her far swordsmen rise.
And would they sheathe the sword before you, friend,
Or scorn your way, while looking in your eyes?
.....

Vachel Lindsay

Men

Man is a creature of a thousand whims;
The slave of hope and fear and circumstance.
Through toil and martyrdom a million years
Struggling and groping upward from the brute,
.....

Hanford Lennox Gordon

Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages

(The Dry Salvages-presumably les trois sauvages
- is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E.
coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced
to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
.....

T. S. Eliot

The Sage

Foreguarded and unfevered and serene,
Back to the perilous gates of Truth he went-
Back to fierce wisdom and the Orient,
To the Dawn that is, that shall be, and has been:
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Sonnet To My Mother

Most near, most dear, most loved, and most far,
Under the huge window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
.....

George Barker

Asia: From Prometheus Unbound

My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
.....

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chinamen Jump

At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump
while in our willful way
we, in secret, play
.....

Frank O'hara

Love Song

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
.....

Dorothy Parker

The New Zealot To The Sun

Persian, you rise
Aflame from climes of sacrifice
Where adulators sue,
And prostrate man, with brow abased,
.....

Herman Melville

The Song Of The Cities

BOMBAY

Royal and Dower-royal, I the Queen
Fronting thy richest sea with richer hands --
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Ode

I

IMAGINATION--ne'er before content,
But aye ascending, restless in her pride
.....

William Wordsworth

The Vanguard [1]

While the crippled cruisers stagger where the blind horizon dips,
And the ocean ooze is rising round the sunken battle-ships,
While the battered wrecks, unnoticed, with their mangled crews drift pastâ??
Let me fire one gun for Russia, though that gun should be the last.
.....

Henry Lawson

Elephants Are Different To Different People

Wilson and Pilcer and Snack stood before the zoo elephant.

Wilson said, 'What is its name? Is it from Asia or Africa? Who feeds
it? Is it a he or a she? How old is it? Do they have twins? How much does
.....

Carl Sandburg

Raja Rao

Raja, I wish I knew
the cause of that malady.
For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
.....

Czeslaw Milosz

The Hermit's Sacrifice

From Rome's palaces and villas
Gaily issued forth a throng;
From her humbler habitations
Moved a human tide along.
.....

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

A Mad Fight Song For William S. Carpenter, 1966

Varus, varus, gib mir meine Legionen wieder


Quick on my feet in those Novembers of my loneliness,
.....

James Arlington Wright

Cymru

Dim in the mist of ages, seeking a resting-place,
Broke on the shores of Britain the wave of an Aryan race.
Clear throâ?? the mist of ages, ere ever the White Christ came,
Songs of the Cymric singers have chanted the Brython fame.
.....

George Essex Evans

Homework

Homage to Kenneth Koch


If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran
.....

Allen Ginsberg

The Song Of Los

AFRICA

I will sing you a song of Los. the Eternal Prophet:
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity.
.....

William Blake

The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea: Book The Fourth.

Stand on the gleaming Pharos,[1] and aloud
Shout, Commerce, to the kingdoms of the earth;
Shout, for thy golden portals are set wide,
And all thy streamers o'er the surge, aloft,
.....

William Lisle Bowles

The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea: Book The Third.

My heart has sighed in secret, when I thought
That the dark tide of time might one day close,
England, o'er thee, as long since it has closed
On Egypt and on Tyre: that ages hence,
.....

William Lisle Bowles

The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea: Book The Second

Oh for a view, as from that cloudless height
Where the great Patriarch gazed upon the world,
His offspring's future seat, back on the vale
Of years departed! We might then behold
.....

William Lisle Bowles

Book Of Love - One More Pair

LOVE is indeed a glorious prize!
What fairer guerdon meets our eyes?--
Though neither wealth nor power are thine,
A very hero thou dost shine.
.....

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Penthesilea

I
The Coming Of The Amazons
Dark in the noonday, dark as solemn pines,
A circle of dark towers above the plain,
.....

Robert Laurence Binyon

Athens: An Ode.

Str. I.

Ere from under earth again like fire the violet kindle,
Ere the holy buds and hoar on olive-branches bloom,
.....

Algernon Charles Swinburne

La Chevelure (her Hair)

Ã? toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure!
� boucles! � parfum chargé de nonchaloir!
Extase! Pour peupler ce soir l'alcôve obscure
Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure,
.....

Charles Baudelaire

Orient To Occident, 1906

You thought me sunk in lethargy, too deeply drugged with sleep
To notice how your armored fleets kept creeping o'er the deep,
Too indolent to organize, too feeble to resist,
Too timid to return the blow of Europe's mailed fist;
.....

John L. Stoddard

Civilization'spurns'the Leopard!

492

Civilization-spurns-the Leopard!
Was the Leopard-bold?
.....

Emily Dickinson

A Proadway Pageant

OVER the western sea, hither from Niphon come,
Courteous, the swart-cheek'd two-sworded envoys,
Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive,
Ride to-day through Manhattan.
.....

Walt Whitman

Monadnoc

Thousand minstrels woke within me,
“Our music's in the hills; “-
Gayest pictures rose to win me,
Leopard-colored rills.
.....

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Metamorphoses: Book 05

While Perseus entertain'd with this report
His father Cepheus, and the list'ning court,
Within the palace walls was heard aloud
The roaring noise of some unruly crowd;
.....

Ovid

Palestine

Old plant of Asia-
Mutilated vine
Holding earth's leaping sap
In every stem and shoot
.....

Lola Ridge

The Tower Beyond Tragedy

I
You'd never have thought the Queen was Helen's sister- Troy's
burning-flower from Sparta, the beautiful sea-flower
Cut in clear stone, crowned with the fragrant golden mane, she
.....

Robinson Jeffers

The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea - Book The Second

Oh for a view, as from that cloudless height
Where the great Patriarch gazed upon the world,
His offspring's future seat, back on the vale
Of years departed! We might then behold
.....

William Lisle Bowles

Passage To India

SINGING my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
.....

Walt Whitman

Hellenistics

I look at the Greek-derived design that nourished my infancy
this Wedgwood copy of the Portland vase:
Someone had given it to my father my eyes at five years old
used to devour it by the hour.
.....

Robinson Jeffers

Two Capitals-1910

Moscow
White Moscow of the pearly towers,
And golden domes for praise,
And chiming hours!
.....

Harriet Monroe

The Butterfly That Stamped

There was never a Queen like Balkis,
From here to the wide world's end;
But Balkis talked to a butterfly
As you would talk to a friend.
.....

Rudyard Kipling