RESPONSE POEMS

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I

I whisper a prayer and it seems as if he doesn't hear.

I call upon his holy name and his response is faded I can barely hear.

.....
Mark Burrell

Mark Burrell
The Old Playhouse

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her
In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
.....

Kamala Das
Waiting For You

CALL:
Alone in this lofty and deserted place,
Have I patiently and eagerly waited.
Among men each day have I search your face;
.....
Evabeta Benefit

Evabeta Benefit
Moses

To grace those lines wch next appear to sight,
The Pencil shone with more abated light,
Yet still ye pencil shone, ye lines were fair,
& awfull Moses stands recorded there.
.....
Thomas Parnell

Thomas Parnell
Tannhauser

To my mother. May, 1870.


The Landgrave Hermann held a gathering
.....
Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus
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

Oscar Wilde
Marmion: Canto Iii. - The Inn

I.

The livelong day Lord Marmion rode:
The mountain path the Palmer showed,
.....

Walter Scott (sir)
Why Did I Laugh Tonight? No Voice Will Tell

Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:
No God, no Demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.
Then to my human heart I turn at once.
.....
John Keats

John Keats
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

Part I

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
.....
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Equity

No bird can sing in tune but that the Lord
Sits throned in equity above the heaven,
And holds the righteous balance always even;
No heart can true response to love afford
.....
George Macdonald

George Macdonald
Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
.....
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot
Minor Poem

The only response
to a child's grave is
to lie down before it and play dead

.....

Bill Knott
The Tourist

Lo! carpet-bag and bagger occupy the land,
And prove the touring season actively begun;
His personnel and purpose can none misunderstand,
For each upon his frontlet bears his honest brand-
.....

Hattie Howard
Thanksgiving

I remember the first time i saw her.
Those brown eyes, beautiful nose and smile.
She caught my attention,
Quickly, something inside me wanted to talk to her.
.....
Blessings Mitembo

Blessings Mitembo
Master Hugues Of Saxe-gotha

An imaginary composer.]

I.

.....
Robert Browning

Robert Browning
A Sign-seeker

I MARK the months in liveries dank and dry,
The day-tides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.
.....
Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy
Reality

These things alone endure;
'They are the solid facts,' that we may grasp,
Leading us on and upward if we clasp
And hold them firm and sure.
.....
Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus
The Journey

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs;
and the flowers were all merry by the roadside;
and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds
while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.
.....

Rabindranath Tagore
In Memory Of My Feelings

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

.....

Frank O'hara
The Kessack Ferry-boat Fatality

'Twas on Friday the 2nd of March, in the year of 1894,
That the Storm Fiend did loudly laugh and roar
Along the Black Isle and the Kessack Ferry shore,
Whereby six men were drowned, which their friends will deplore.
.....

William Topaz Mcgonagall
I Heard Immanuel Singing

(The poem shows the Master, with his work done, singing to free his heart
in Heaven.)

This poem is intended to be half said, half sung, very softly,
.....
Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay
Tristram Of Lyonesse - V - Iseult At Tintagel

But that same night in Cornwall oversea
Couched at Queen Iseult's hand, against her knee,
With keen kind eyes that read her whole heart's pain
Fast at wide watch lay Tristram's hound Hodain,
.....
Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Petition

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
.....
W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden
Mutability

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! -yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
.....
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Burnt-offering

Thrice-happy he whose heart, each new-born night,
When old-worn day hath vanished o'er earth's brim,
And he hath laid him down in chamber dim,
Straightway begins to tremble and grow bright,
.....
George Macdonald

George Macdonald
I Think When I Stand In The Presence Of Death

I think when I stand in the presence of Death,
How futile is earthy endeavor,
If it be, with the flight of the last labored breath,
The tongue has been silenced forever.
.....

Alfred Castner King
Saint Romualdo

I give God thanks that I, a lean old man,
Wrinkled, infirm, and crippled with keen pains
By austere penance and continuous toil,
Now rest in spirit, and possess “the peace
.....
Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus
Clifton Grove: A Sketch

Lo! in the west, fast fades the lingering light,
And day's last vestige takes its silent flight.
No more is heard the woodman's measured stroke,
Which with the dawn from yonder dingle broke;
.....

Henry Kirk White
My Soul Is Sunk In All-suffusing Shame

My soul is sunk in all-suffusing shame;
Yet not for any individual sin,
But that the world's original fair fame-
My own land's most-is not what it hath been.
.....

Alfred Austin
The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz-he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

.....
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot
The Bean Field

…but infinities also passed out of this life,
not having any witnesses, how, when, or in
what manner they departed.
-Boccaccio, The Decameron
.....

Jocelyn Emerson
Arise, American! (ii)

The soul of a nation awaking,-
High visions of daybreak,-I saw;
A people renewed; the forsaking
Of sin, and the worship of law.
.....
George Parsons Lathrop

George Parsons Lathrop
Response

Beside that milestone where the level sun,
Nigh unto setting, sheds his last, low rays
On word and work irrevocably done,
Life's blending threads of good and ill outspun,
.....
John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier
Response

When Phyllis sighs and from her eyes
The light dies out; my soul replies
With misery of deep-drawn breath,
E'en as it were at war with death.
.....
Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar
Sonnet. Why Did I Laugh Tonight?

Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell
No God, no Demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell
Then to my human heart I turn at once:
.....
John Keats

John Keats
Ode To A Mountain-torrent (from The German Of Stolberg)

How lovely art thou in thy tresses of foam,
And yet the warm blood in my bosom grows chill,
When yelling thou rollest thee down from thy home,
'Mid the boom of the echoing forest and hill.
.....
George Borrow

George Borrow
Unspoken Words

Unspoken words may thrill the heart,
Their meaning be more deeply felt
Than all the glowing oratory
Poured at the shrine where reason knelt.
.....

Madge Morris Wagner
The Spirit Of Shakespeare

Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured
He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell
Of human passions, but of love deflowered
His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well.
.....
George Meredith

George Meredith
City Of Orgies

CITY of orgies, walks and joys!
City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make
you illustrious,
Not the pageants of you--not your shifting tableaux, your spectacles,
.....
Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman
Response

There is a music of immaculate love,
That beats within the virgin veins of Spring,
And trillium blossoms, like the stars that cling
To fairies' wands; and, strung on sprays above,
.....
Madison Julius Cawein

Madison Julius Cawein
Gnothi Seauton

I

If thou canst bear
Strong meat of simple truth
.....
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Three-fold

Somewhere I've read a thoughtful mind's reflection:
'All perfect things are three-fold'; and I know
Our love has the rare symbol of perfection;
The brain's response, the warm blood's rapturous glow,
.....
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Eureka - A Prose Poem (an Essay On The Material And Spiritual Universe)

It is with humility really unassumed, it is with a sentiment even of awe, that I pen the opening sentence of this work: for of all conceivable subjects I approach the reader with the most solemn, the most comprehensive, the most difficult, the most august.

What terms shall I find sufficiently simple in their sublimity -- sufficiently sublime in their simplicity, for the mere enunciation of my theme?

.....
Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe
The Excursion - Book Seventh - The Churchyard Among The Mountains - (continued)

While thus from theme to theme the Historian passed,
The words he uttered, and the scene that lay
Before our eyes, awakened in my mind
Vivid remembrance of those long-past hours;
.....
William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth
Sonnet: Why Did I Laugh Tonight?

Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell
No God, no Demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell
Then to my human heart I turn at once:
.....
John Keats

John Keats
Sordello: Book The Fifth

Is it the same Sordello in the dusk
As at the dawn? merely a perished husk
Now, that arose a power fit to build
Up Rome again? The proud conception chilled
.....
Robert Browning

Robert Browning
Sordello: Book The Third

And the font took them: let our laurels lie!
Braid moonfern now with mystic trifoly
Because once more Goito gets, once more,
Sordello to itself! A dream is o'er,
.....
Robert Browning

Robert Browning
Aurora Leigh: Book Fourth

They met still sooner. 'Twas a year from thence
That Lucy Gresham, the sick sempstress girl,
Who sewed by Marian's chair so still and quick,
And leant her head upon its back to cough
.....
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (in Seven Parts)

PART I

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
.....
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Lambs On The Boulder

I hear that the Commune di Padova has an exhibition of master-
pieces from Giotto to Mantegna. Giotto is the master of angels, and
Mantegna is the master of the dead Christ, one of the few human
beings who seems to have understood that Christ did indeed come
.....

James Arlington Wright