SENSUAL POEMS

Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
.....

W. H. Auden

Growing In Spirit

He who hopes to grow in spirit
will have to transcend obedience and respect.
He'll hold to some laws
but he'll mostly violate
.....

Constantine P. Cavafy

Sonnet 035: No More Be Grieved At That Which Thou Hast Done

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
.....

William Shakespeare

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
.....

W. H. Auden

The Sonnets Cxli - In Faith I Do Not Love Thee With Mine Eyes

In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote.
.....

William Shakespeare

The Englishman In Italy

(PIANO DI SORRENTO.)

Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
.....

Robert Browning

Dejection: An Ode

Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon,
With the old moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
.....

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Last Walk In Autumn

I.
O'er the bare woods, whose outstretched hands
Plead with the leaden heavens in vain,
I see, beyond the valley lands,
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

The Child Of The Islands - Winter

I.

ERE the Night cometh! On how many graves
Rests, at this hour, their first cold winter's snow!
.....

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton

The Brewing Of Soma

The fagots blazed, the caldron's smoke
Up through the green wood curled;
'Bring honey from the hollow oak,
Bring milky sap,' the brewers spoke,
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

The Great Hunger

I
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
.....

Patrick Kavanagh

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
.....

W. H. Auden

Comus

A Masque Presented At Ludlow Castle, 1634, Before

The Earl Of Bridgewater, Then President Of Wales.

.....

John Milton

An Essay On Man: Epistle I.

THE DESIGN.

Having proposed to write some pieces on human life and manners, such as (to use my Lord Bacon's expression) come home to men's business and bosoms, I thought it more satisfactory to begin with considering man in the abstract, his nature and his state; since, to prove any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition and relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose of its being.

.....

Alexander Pope

The Deserted Village

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visits paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed:
.....

Oliver Goldsmith

Ode On A Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
.....

John Keats

Fears In Solitude

Written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion

A green and silent spot, amid the hills,
A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place
.....

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Sphinx

(To Marcel Schwob in friendship and in admiration)

In a dim corner of my room for longer than
my fancy thinks
.....

Oscar Wilde

Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton

I

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

T. S. Eliot

Sonnet Xxxv

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
.....

William Shakespeare

La Nue

Oft when sweet music undulated round,
Like the full moon out of a perfumed sea
Thine image from the waves of blissful sound
Rose and thy sudden light illumined me.
.....

Alan Seeger

The Sultan's Palace

My spirit only lived to look on Beauty's face,
As only when they clasp the arms seem served aright;
As in their flesh inheres the impulse to embrace,
To gaze on Loveliness was my soul's appetite.
.....

Alan Seeger

The Rose

Betwene the Cytee and the Chirche of Bethlehem, is the felde
Floridus, that is to seyne, the feld florisched. For als
moche as a fayre Mayden was blamed with wrong and
sclaundred, that sche hadde don fornicacioun, for whiche
.....

Robert Southey

Sheridan

Embalm'd in fame, and sacred from decay,
What mighty name, in arms, in arts, or verse,
From England claims this consecrated day.
Her nobles crowding round the shadowy hearse?
.....

Thomas Gent

Music

Written between the ages of fourteen and fifteen,
with a few subsequent verbal alterations


.....

Henry Kirk White

Tenebrae

He was so tired that he was scarcely able to hear a note of the songs: he felt imprisoned in a cold region where his brain was numb and his spirit was isolated.

1

.....

Geoffrey Hill

Satyr

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man)
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas'd to weare,
.....

John Wilmot

The Woman

Go sleep, my sweetie-rest-rest!
Oh soft little hand on mother's breast!
Oh soft little lips-the din's mos' gone-
Over and done, my dearie one!
.....

Harriet Monroe

The Case Of Conscience

THOSE who in fables deal, bestow at ease
Both names and titles, freely as they please.
It costs them scarcely any thing, we find.
And each is nymph or shepherdess designed;
.....

Jean De La Fontaine

An Essay Upon Satire

By Me Dryden And The Earl Of Mulgrave,[1] 1679.

How dull, and how insensible a beast
Is man, who yet would lord it o'er the rest!
.....

John Dryden

The Progress Of Error.

Si quid loquar audiendam.--Hor. Lib. iv. Od. 2.



.....

William Cowper

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 118. Contemplate All This Work Of Tim

Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Artists

How gracefully, O man, with thy palm-bough,
Upon the waning century standest thou,
In proud and noble manhood's prime,
With unlocked senses, with a spirit freed,
.....

Friedrich Schiller

Lawstudent And Coach

Each day I sit in an ill-lighted room
To teach a boy;
For one hour by the clock great words and dreams
Are our employ.
.....

Lesbia Harford

Gilbert

I. THE GARDEN.

ABOVE the city hung the moon,
Right o'er a plot of ground
.....

Charlotte Brontë

The Colloquy Of Monos And Una

[Greek: Mellonta sauta']

These things are in the future.

.....

Edgar Allan Poe

White Chocolate

White chocolate when i taste it,
It makes me think of you,
It's melting upon my tongue gently,
And remembers me of your sensual lips.
.....

Cristina Teodor

In Despair

He has lost him completely.     And now he is seeking
on the lips of     every new lover
the lips of his beloved;     in the embrace
of every new lover     he seeks to be deluded
.....

Constantine P. Cavafy

The Person Of The House

IDYL CCCLXVI
THE ACCOMPANIMENTS
1. The Monthly Nurse
2. The Caudle
.....

Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Artists.

How gracefully, O man, with thy palm-bough,
Upon the waning century standest thou,
In proud and noble manhood's prime,
With unlocked senses, with a spirit freed,
.....

Friedrich Schiller

Queen Mab: Part V.

'Thus do the generations of the earth
Go to the grave and issue from the womb,
Surviving still the imperishable change
That renovates the world; even as the leaves
.....

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Coplas De Manrique (from The Spanish)

O let the soul her slumbers break,
Let thought be quickened, and awake;
Awake to see
How soon this life is past and gone,
.....

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sonnet 141: In Faith, I Do Not Love Thee With Mine Eyes

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
.....

William Shakespeare

Transitional

First he said:
It is the woman in us
That makes us write-
Let us acknowledge it-
.....

William Carlos Williams

France: An Ode

I

Ye clouds! that far above me float and pause,
Whose pathless march no mortal may control!
.....

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Satire Against Reason And Mankind

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
.....

John Wilmot

My Mind Is

my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
chipping with sharp fatal tools
.....

E. E. Cummings

Answer

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
.....

Sir Walter Scott

Paris

I

First, London, for its myriads; for its height,
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite;
.....

Alan Seeger

The Diary Of An Old Soul: 09 ' September.

1.

We are a shadow and a shining, we!
One moment nothing seems but what we see,
.....

George Macdonald