The Stone Man
Geoffrey Hill
Half-recognized kingdom of the dead:
A deeper landscape lit by distant
Flashing from their journey.
Tag Archives: Exerpt
Entry LXXVIII – June
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!–
Why look ‘st thou so?”– with my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.
…
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Entry LXXVII – June
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
Entry LIV – April
The Great Lover
Rupert Brook
But the best I’ve known,
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains.
Entry LIII – April
The Great Lover
Rupert Brook
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;—
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass.
Entry XLII – January
from The Tempest
William Shakespeare
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.
Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark.
Bow-wow.
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.
Entry XXXII – October
The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes – or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two – is gone.
A Moment’s Halt – a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well amid the Waste –
And Lo! the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The Nothing it set out from – Oh, make haste!
Entry XXVII – September
Hawk’s Way
Theodore Olson
This was the hawk’s way. This way the hawk
Nested a moment on the incredible
Crag of the wind, sitting the air like rock.
This was the perilous, lovely way the hawk fell
Down the long hill of the wind, the anarch air
Shaped by his going: air become visible, bent
To a blade of beauty, cruel and taut and bare,
A bow of ecstasy, singing and insolent.
Then air deployed again, and was only air
On the empty way the hawk in his beauty went.
Fine Poems, Fine Art 