The beauty and versatility of the English Language is never more evident than in its poetry. The dept of the emotions plummeted, the passion, the music of English elevates the heart and the soul and inspires the human spirit to new heights of freedom and understanding while holding a mirror up to our civilization.
Josephine Kermode, John the Priest,
Then John the Priest stretched forth his hands,
And blessed the rising sun,
And blessed the simple folk around,
And taught them one by one
Alice Meynell, The Shepherdess
She walks - the lady of my delight-
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She guards them from the steep:
Emily Bronte, No coward soul is mine
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere,
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.
Emily Dickinson, There is no Frigate like a Book
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Courses like a Page
Of prancing Poetry -
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
Marie E. J. Pitt, Spider Orchids
Will they waken once, I wonder, to a wild horn blowing,
When a little lost wind whimpers and the Cross is leaning low?
Will they see the lamps of Faery down her green glades glowing?
Will they hear the taut strings throbbing to a new resined bow,
And go dancing, dancing, dancing, spilling laughter as they go?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Is God not with us on this earth?
But then the thrushes sang,
And shook my pulses and the elms’ new leaves,
At which I turned, and held my finger up,
And bade him mark that, howsoe’er the world
Went ill, as he related, certainly
The thrushes still sang in it
John Masefield, Sea Fever
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied,
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. Andrew Barton Patterson, The Traveling Post Office
By big lagoons where wildfowl play and crested pigeons flock,
By camp-fires where the drovers ride around their restless stock,
And past the teamster toiling down to fetch the wool away,
My letter chases Conroy’ s sheep along the Castlereagh.
C. Essex Evans, The Women of the West
Well have we held our fathers’ creed. No call has passed us by.
We faced and fought the wilderness, we sent our sons to die.
And we have hearts to do and dare, and yet, o’er all the rest,
The hearts that made the Nation were the Women of the West. Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns,
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
Mary Anneeta Mann, Passover/Easter 2002 - The Return from Mecca
I woke up on Easter Morning,
And there was peace in the Middle East.
In my dream there was a classroom,
A classroom without walls,
The teacher was a wisp of cloud,
With the voice of a dulcimer.
There are no enemies, she said
As her eyes glowed.
Bernard O’Dowd, The Poet
The bosoms of women he sang of are heaving to-day in our maids;
The God that he drew from the Silence our woes or our weariness aids;
Not a maxim has needled through Time, but a poet had feathered its shaft,
Not a law is a boon to the people but he has dictated its draft. A.D. Hope, Conversation with Calliope
So in this next barbarian age,
Small clans we choose and hold apart,
Some few in whom the heavenly rage
Still blazes and keeps pure the heart;
The human jungle sets the stage
Where these new levites learn their part
To guard the coals and keep them fanned
And bear them towards the Promised Land.
Radomir Voijtech Luza, BarD
You see, big, bold and brassy does not pay in Ia
where outfits do not match
shoes are pink, pink and more pink
and the only fool crazy enough to do a macbeth monologue is me, put up against a cream wall and shot.
William Butler Yeats, The Cloths of Heaven
But I, being poor, have only my dreams,
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Don Kingfisher Campbell, Top of the News
Bear opens garage door,
enters Alaska home, reminds me