Prelude to Space

Related poetry:

1. Prelude They say that rhyme and rhythm are Outmoded now. I do not know, for I am far From high of brow. But if the twain you take away, Since basely bred, Proud Poetry, I dare to say, Would scarce be read. With humble heart I thus define My rôle in rhyme: Oh may I never […]...
2. Not What Was Meant When the Academy of Arts demanded freedom Of artistic expression from narrow-minded bureaucrats There was a howl and a clamour in its immediate vicinity But roaring above everything Came a deafening thunder of applause From beyond the Sector boundary. Freedom! it roared. Freedom for the artists! Freedom all round! Freedom for all! Freedom for the […]...
3. The Violent Space (Or When Your Sister Sleeps Around For Money) Exchange in greed the ungraceful signs. Thrust The thick notes between green apple breasts. Then the shadow of the devil descends, The violent space cries and angel eyes, Large and dark, retreat in innocence and in ice. (Run sister run-the Bugga man comes!) The violent space cries silently, Like you cried wide years ago In […]...
4. Prelude Pleasant it was, when woods were green, And winds were soft and low, To lie amid some sylvan scene. Where, the long drooping boughs between, Shadows dark and sunlight sheen Alternate come and go; Or where the denser grove receives No sunlight from above, But the dark foliage interweaves In one unbroken roof of leaves, […]...
5. June 19 What is it about the Abyss That tempts the young poet to kiss The air and head for the nearest cliff? This Unreasonable attachment to the bliss Of falling what accounts for it? Unlike the hiss Announcing a reptilian presence, the word Abyss Creates the object of our dread: it exists, it is, Widening like […]...
6. Bivouac on a Mountain Side I SEE before me now, a traveling army halting; Below, a fertile valley spread, with barns, and the orchards of summer; Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt in places, rising high; Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes, dingily seen; The numerous camp-fires scatter’d near and far, some away up on […]...
7. Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa O THOU undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they; By all thy brim-fill’d bowls of fierce […]...
8. The Legend Of The One-Eyed Man Like Oedipus I am losing my sight. LIke Judas I have done my wrong. Their punishment is over; The shame and disgrace of it Are all used up. But as for me, Look into my face And you will know that crimes dropped upon me As from a high building And although I cannot speak […]...
9. In The Same Space The surroundings of home, centers, neighorhood Which I see and where I walk; for years and years. I have created you in joy and in sorrows: With so many circumstances, with so many things. And you have become all feeling, for me....
10. Toward The Space Age We must begin to catch hold of everything Around us, for nobody knows what we May need. We have to carry along The air, even; and the weight we once Thought a burden turns out to form The pulse of our life and the compass for our brain. Colors balance our fears, and existence Begins […]...
11. Prelude I have eaten your bread and salt. I have drunk your water and wine. In deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives ye led were mine. Was there aught that I did not share In vigil or toil or ease, One joy or woe that I did not know, Dear hearts across […]...
12. Prelude How could I love you more? I would give up Even that beauty I have loved too well That I might love you better. Alas, how poor the gifts that lovers give I can but give you of my flesh and strength, I can but give you these few passing days And passionate words that, […]...
13. Prelude BY sunny market-place and street Wherever I go my drum I beat, And wherever I go in my coat of red The ribbons flutter about my head. I seek recruits for wars to come – For slaughterless wars I beat the drum, And the shilling I give to each new ally Is hope to live […]...
14. The Space Heater On the then-below-zero day, it was on, Near the patients’ chair, the old heater Kept by the analyst’s couch, at the end, Like the infant’s headstone that was added near the foot Of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the almost Laughing satire of a fire’s heat, The little coils like hairs in […]...
15. The Space Coast Florida An Airedale rolling through green frost, Cabbage palms pointing their accusing leaves At whom, petulant waves breaking at my feet. I ran from them. Nights, yellow lights Scoured sand. What was ever found But women in skirts folded around the men They loved that Friday? No one found me. And how could that have […]...
16. Prelude Between the green bud and the red Youth sat and sang by Time, and shed From eyes and tresses flowers and tears, From heart and spirit hopes and fears, Upon the hollow stream whose bed Is channelled by the foamless years; And with the white the gold-haired head Mixed running locks, and in Time’s ears […]...
17. There is a solitude of space There is a solitude of space A solitude of sea A solitude of death, but these Society shall be Compared with that profounder site That polar privacy A soul admitted to itself Finite infinity....
18. Ladies And Gentlemen In Outer Space Here is my philosophy: Everything changes (the word “everything” Has just changed as the Word “change” has: it now Means “no change”) so Quickly that it literally surpasses my belief, Charges right past it Like some of the giant Ideas in this area. I had no beginning and I shall have No end: the beam […]...
19. What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space What birds plunge through is not the intimate space, In which you see all Forms intensified. (In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself, Would disappear into that vastness.) Space reaches from us and translates Things: To become the very essence of a tree, Throw inner space around it, from that space That lives in […]...
20. Prelude to an Evening Do not enforce the tired wolf Dragging his infected wound homeward To sit tonight with the warm children Naming the pretty kings of France. The images of the invaded mind Being as the monsters in the dreams Of your most brief enchanted headful, Suppose a miracle of confusion: That dreamed and undreamt become each other […]...
21. Prelude – Lohengrin Love, out of the depth of things, As a dewfall felt from above, From the heaven whence only springs Love, Love, heard from the heights thereof, The clouds and the watersprings, Draws close as the clouds remove. And the soul in it speaks and sings, A swan sweet-souled as a dove, An echo that only […]...
22. In Memoriam A. H. H.: The Prelude Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. […]...
23. Prelude – Tristan And Isolde Fate, out of the deep sea’s gloom, When a man’s heart’s pride grows great, And nought seems now to foredoom Fate, Fate, laden with fears in wait, Draws close through the clouds that loom, Till the soul see, all too late, More dark than a dead world’s tomb, More high than the sheer dawn’s gate, […]...
24. Prelude to an Unwritten Masterpiece You like my bird-sung gardens: wings and flowers; Calm landscapes for emotion; star-lit lawns; And Youth against the sun-rise… ‘Not profound; ‘But such a haunting music in the sound: ‘Do it once more; it helps us to forget’. Last night I dreamt an old recurring scene – Some complex out of childhood; (sex, of course!) […]...
25. Written On A Blank Space At The End Of Chaucer's Tale Of The Flowre And The Lefe This pleasant tale is like a little copse: The honied lines so freshly interlace, To keep the reader in so sweet a place, So that he here and there full-hearted stops; And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops Come cool and suddenly against his face, And, by the wandering melody, may trace Which way the […]...
26. Style Flaubert wanted to write a novel About nothing. It was to have no subject And be sustained upon the style alone, Like the Holy Ghost cruising above The abyss, or like the little animals In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch That breaks, but do not fall Till they look down. He never wrote […]...
27. We Are Going They came in to the little town A semi-naked band subdued and silent All that remained of their tribe. They came here to the place of their old bora ground Where now the many white men hurry about like ants. Notice of the estate agent reads: ‘Rubbish May Be Tipped Here’. Now it half covers […]...
28. Preludium to Europe The nameless shadowy female rose from out the breast of Orc, Her snaky hair brandishing in the winds of Enitharmon; And thus her voice arose: ‘O mother Enitharmon, wilt thou bring forth other sons? To cause my name to vanish, that my place may not be found, For I am faint with travail, Like the […]...
29. Village Don Juan Lord, I’m grey, my face is run, But by old Harry, I’ve had my fun; And all about, I seem to see Lads and lassies that look like me; Ice-blue eyes on every hand, Handsomest youngsters in the land. “Old Stud Horse” they say of me, But back of my beard I laugh with glee. […]...
30. THE WITNESSES In Ocean’s wide domains, Half buried in the sands, Lie skeletons in chains, With shackled feet and hands. Beyond the fall of dews, Deeper than plummet lies, Float ships, with all their crews, No more to sink nor rise. There the black Slave-ship swims, Freighted with human forms, Whose fettered, fleshless limbs Are not the […]...
31. What Kind Of Mistress He Would Have Be the mistress of my choice, Clean in manners, clear in voice; Be she witty, more than wise, Pure enough, though not precise; Be she showing in her dress, Like a civil wilderness, That the curious may detect Order in a sweet neglect; Be she rolling in her eye, Tempting all the passers by; And […]...
32. The Flaming Heart O heart, the equal poise of love’s both parts, Big alike with wounds and darts, Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same, And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart, and love and die and kill, And bleed and wound, and yield and conquer still. Let this immortal life, […]...
33. The Likeness When I came forth this morn I saw Quite twenty cloudlets in the air; And then I saw a flock of sheep, Which told me how these clouds came there. That flock of sheep, on that green grass, Well might it lie so still and proud! Its likeness had been drawn in heaven, On a […]...
34. The Tent Only the stars endome the lonely camp, Only the desert leagues encompass it; Waterless wastes, a wilderness of wit, Embattled Cold, Imagination’s Cramp. Now were the Desolation fain to stamp The congealed Spirit of man into the pit, Save that, unquenchable because unlit, The Love of God burns steady, like a Lamp. It burns! beyond […]...
35. Unlyric Love Song It is time to give that-of-myself which I could not at first: To offer you now at last my least and my worst: Minor, absurd preserves, The shell’s end-curves, A document kept at the back of a drawer, A tin hidden under the floor, Recalcitrant prides and hesitations: To pile them carefully in a desparate […]...
36. Sentimental Hangman ‘Tis hard to hang a husky lad When larks are in the sky; It hurts when daffydills are glad To wring a neck awry, When joy o’ Spring is in the sap And cheery in the sun, ‘Tis sad to string aloft a chap, No matter what he done. And sittin’ in the pub o’ […]...
37. 209. Song-M'Pherson's Farewell FAREWELL, ye dungeons dark and strong, The wretch’s destinie! M’Pherson’s time will not be long On yonder gallows-tree. Chorus.-Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, Sae dauntingly gaed he; He play’d a spring, and danc’d it round, Below the gallows-tree. O, what is death but parting breath? On many a bloody plain I’ve dared his face, and in […]...
38. Mummia As those of old drank mummia To fire their limbs of lead, Making dead kings from Africa Stand pandar to their bed; Drunk on the dead, and medicined With spiced imperial dust, In a short night they reeled to find Ten centuries of lust. So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme, Stuffed love’s infinity, […]...
39. On the Wallaby Now the tent poles are rotting, the camp fires are dead, And the possums may gambol in trees overhead; I am humping my bluey far out on the land, And the prints of my bluchers sink deep in the sand: I am out on the wallaby humping my drum, And I came by the tracks […]...
40. Ballad of the Goodly Fere Simon Zelotes speaking after the Crucifixion. Fere=Mate, Companion. Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all For the priests and the gallows tree? Aye lover he was of brawny men, O’ ships and the open sea. When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man His smile was good to see, “First let these […]...