The Sonnets To Orpheus: XXV

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1. The Sonnets To Orpheus: I A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence A new beginning, beckoning, change appeared. Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright Unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests; And it was not from any dullness, not From […]...
2. The Sonnets To Orpheus: X You who are close to my heart always, I welcome you, ancient coffins of stone, Which the cheerful water of Roman days Still flows through, like a wandering song. Or those other ones that are open wide Like the eyes of a happily waking shepard -with silence and bee-suck nettle inside, From which ecstatic butterflies […]...
3. The Sonnets To Orpheus: IV O you tender ones, walk now and then Into the breath that blows coldly past, Upon your cheeks let it tremble and part; Behind you it will tremble together again. O you blessed ones, you who are whole, You who seem the beginning of hearts, Bows for the arrows and arrows’ targets Tear-bright, your lips […]...
4. The Sonnets To Orpheus: XIX Though the world keeps changing its form As fast as a cloud, still What is accomplished falls home To the Primeval. Over the change and the passing, Larger and freer, Soars your eternal song, God with the lyre. Never has grief been possesed, Never has love been learned, And what removes us in death Is […]...
5. The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: VI Rose, you majesty-once, to the ancients, you were Just a calyx with the simplest of rims. But for us, you are the full, the numberless flower, The inexhaustible countenance. In your wealth you seem to be wearing gown upon gown Upon a body of nothing but light; Yet each seperate petal is at the same […]...
6. The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: I Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete Interchange of our own Essence with world-space. You counterweight In which I rythmically happen. Single wave-motion whose Gradual sea I am: You, most inclusive of all our possible seas- Space has grown warm. How many regions in space have already been Inside me. There are winds that seem like My […]...
7. The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XXIII Call to me to the one among your moments That stands against you, ineluctably: Intimate as a dog’s imploring glance But, again, forever, turned away When you think you’ve captured it at last. What seems so far from you is most your own. We are already free, and were dismissed Where we thought we soon […]...
8. The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XIII Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were Behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter That only by wintering through it all will your heart survive. Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise Into the seamless life proclaimed in your […]...
9. Sonnets From An Ungrafted Tree XLI I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind, Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear you body’s weight upon my breast: So subtly is the fume of life designed, To clairfy the pulse and cloud the […]...
10. Sonnets iv THY bosom is endeared with all hearts Which I, by lacking, have supposed dead: And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye, As interest of the dead! which now appear But […]...
11. Sonnets iii WHEN to the Sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh […]...
12. Sonnets 10: Oh, My Beloved, Have You Thought Of This Oh, my beloved, have you thought of this: How in the years to come unscrupulous Time, More cruel than Death, will tear you from my kiss, And make you old, and leave me in my prime? How you and I, who scale together yet A little while the sweet, immortal height No pilgrim may remember […]...
13. Sonnets xviii LET me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth ‘s unknown, […]...
14. Sonnets XXX: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh […]...
15. Sonnets CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although […]...
16. A Calendar of Sonnets: December The lakes of ice gleam bluer than the lakes Of water ‘neath the summer sunshine gleamed: Far fairer than when placidly it streamed, The brook its frozen architecture makes, And under bridges white its swift way takes. Snow comes and goes as messenger who dreamed Might linger on the road; or one who deemed His […]...
17. The Refugees In the shabby train no seat is vacant. The child in the ripped mask Sprawls undisturbed in the waste Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant? They had faces and lives like you. What was it they possessed That they were willing to trade for this? The dried blood sparkles along the mask Of […]...
18. Orpheus ? or John Fletcher. ORPHEUS with his lute made trees And the mountain tops that freeze Bow themselves when he did sing: To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads […]...
19. Sonnets xvii O NEVER say that I was false of heart, Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify! As easy might I from myself depart, As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie: That is my home of love; if I have ranged, Like him that travels I return again, Just to the time, not […]...
20. ORPHEUS Orpheus he went, as poets tell, To fetch Eurydice from hell; And had her, but it was upon This short, but strict condition; Backward he should not look, while he Led her through hell’s obscurity. But ah! it happen’d, as he made His passage through that dreadful shade, Revolve he did his loving eye, For […]...
21. Sonnets CX: Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there And made myself a motley to the view, Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new. Most true it is that I have look’d on truth Askance and strangely: but, by all above, These blenches gave my heart […]...
22. Sonnets xiv MY love is strengthen’d, though more weak in seeming; I love not less, though less the show appear: That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere. Our love was new, and then but in the spring, When I was wont to greet it with my lays; As Philomel in summer’s […]...
23. Sonnets ix FAREWELL! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou know’st thy estimate: The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate. For how do I hold thee but by thy granting? And for that riches where is my deserving? The cause of this fair gift in […]...
24. A Tree Telling of Orpheus White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling began I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog Didn’t stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving. Yet the rippling drew nearer – and then my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if […]...
25. SONNETS TO EUROPA Frost apple on a knotted whirling bough Of dark becoming where it cannot be. So much both for the soil and for the tree, So much for things that are becoming now. You’re melting, slowly dripping from the prow Of a proud sphere pointing right at me, So leaves caught in the cobweb, endlessly Rotate […]...
26. When Orpheus Sweetly Did Complayne When Orpheus sweetly did complayne Upon his lute with heavy strayne How his Euridice was slayne, The trees to heare Obtayn’d an eare, And after left it off againe. At every stroake and every stay The boughs kept time, and nodding lay, And listened bending all one way: The aspen tree As well as hee […]...
27. Sonnets 03: Not With Libations, But With Shouts And Laughter Not with libations, but with shouts and laughter We drenched the altars of Love’s sacred grove, Shaking to earth green fruits, impatient after The launching of the colored moths of Love. Love’s proper myrtle and his mother’s zone We bound about our irreligious brows, And fettered him with garlands of our own, And spread a […]...
28. Orpheus with his Lute Made Trees Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves, when he did sing: To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Everything that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In […]...
29. A Calendar of Sonnets: October The month of carnival of all the year, When Nature lets the wild earth go its way, And spend whole seasons on a single day. The spring-time holds her white and purple dear; October, lavish, flaunts them far and near; The summer charily her reds doth lay Like jewels on her costliest array; October, scornful, […]...
30. A Calendar of Sonnets: February Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white; And reigns the winter’s pregnant silence still; No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill, And willow stems grow daily red and bright. These are days when ancients held a rite Of expiation for the old year’s ill, And prayer to purify the new year’s will: […]...
31. Sonnets 02: Into The Golden Vessel Of Great Song Into the golden vessel of great song Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast Let other lovers lie, in love and rest; Not we,-articulate, so, but with the tongue Of all the world: the churning blood, the long Shuddering quiet, the desperate hot palms pressed Sharply together upon the escaping guest, The common […]...
32. With a Copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Leaving College As one of some fat tillage dispossessed, Weighing the yield of these four faded years, If any ask what fruit seems loveliest, What lasting gold among the garnered ears, Ah, then I’ll say what hours I had of thine, Therein I reaped Time’s richest revenue, Read in thy text the sense of David’s line, Through […]...
33. Two Sonnets In Memory (Nicola Sacco Bartolomeo Vanzetti) Executed August 23, 1927 I As men have loved their lovers in times past And sung their wit, their virtue and their grace, So have we loved sweet Justice to the last, That now lies here in an unseemly place. The child will quit the cradle and grow wise And stare […]...
34. For Little Things Last night I looked across the hills And through an arch of darkling pine Low-swung against a limpid west I saw a young moon shine. And as I gazed there blew a wind, Loosed where the sylvan shadows stir, Bringing delight to soul and sense The breath of dying fir. This morn I saw a […]...
35. Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets 1 Lo dм che han detto a’ dolci amici addio. – Dante Amor, con quanto sforzo oggi mi vinci! – Petrarca Come back to me, who wait and watch for you: Or come not yet, for it is over then, And long it is before you come again, So far between my pleasures are and […]...
36. The Wicked Postman Why do you sit there on the floor so quiet and silent, tell me, Mother dear? The rain is coming in through the open window, making you all Wet, and you don’t mind it. Do you hear the gong striking four? It is time for my brother To come home from school. What has happened […]...
37. From Citron-Bower From citron-bower be her bed, Cut from branch of tree a-flower, Fashioned for her maidenhead. From Lydian apples, sweet of hue, Cut the width of board and lathe, Carve the feet from myrtle-wood. Let the palings of her bed Be quince and box-wood overlaid With the scented bark of yew. That all the wood in […]...
38. Love In The Asylum A stranger has come To share my room in the house not right in the head, A girl mad as birds Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume. Strait in the mazed bed She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room, At large […]...
39. Sestina I wandered o’er the vast green plains of youth, And searched for Pleasure. On a distant height Fame’s silhouette stood sharp against the skies. Beyond vast crowds that thronged a broad highway I caught the glimmer of a golden goal, While from a blooming bower smiled siren Love. Straight gazing in her eyes, I laughed […]...
40. In The Firelight The fire upon the hearth is low, And there is stillness everywhere, While like winged spirits, here and there, The firelight shadows fluttering go. And as the shadows round me creep, A childish treble breaks the gloom, And softly from a further room Comes, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” And somehow, with that […]...