Poems

IF I SHOULD DIE by Emily Dickinson

IF I should die,

And you should live,

And time should gurgle on,

And morn should beam,

And noon should burn,

As it has usual done;

If birds should build as early,

And bees as bustling go,--

One might depart at option

From enterprise below!

'Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand

When we with daisies lie,

That commerce will continue,

And trades as briskly fly.

It make the parting tranquil

And keeps the soul serene,

That gentlemen so sprightly

Conduct the pleasing scene!

Broken Love by William Blake.

MY Spectre around me night and day 

Like a wild beast guards my way; 

My Emanation far within 

Weeps incessantly for my sin.

‘A fathomless and boundless deep, 

There we wander, there we weep; 

On the hungry craving wind 

My Spectre follows thee behind.

‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow 

Wheresoever thou dost go, 

Thro’ the wintry hail and rain. 

When wilt thou return again?

’Dost thou not in pride and scorn 

Fill with tempests all my morn, 

And with jealousies and fears 

Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

‘Seven of my sweet loves thy 

knife Has bereavèd of their life. 

Their marble tombs I built with tears, 

And with cold and shuddering fears.

‘Seven more loves weep night and day 

Round the tombs where my loves lay, 

And seven more loves attend each night 

Around my couch with torches bright.

‘And seven more loves in my bed 

Crown with wine my mournful head, 

Pitying and forgiving all 

Thy transgressions great and small.

‘When wilt thou return and view 

My loves, and them to life renew? 

When wilt thou return and live? 

When wilt thou pity as I forgive?’

‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan: 

Hast thou no sins of thy own? 

O’er my sins thou sit and weep, 

And lull thy own sins fast asleep.

‘What transgressions I commit 

Are for thy transgressions fit. 

They thy harlots, thou their slave; 

And my bed becomes their grave.

‘Never, never, I return: 

Still for victory I burn. 

Living, thee alone I’ll have; 

And when dead I’ll be thy grave.

‘Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell 

Thou shalt never, quell: 

I will fly and thou pursue: 

Night and morn the flight renew.’

‘Poor, pale, pitiable form 

That I follow in a storm; 

Iron tears and groans of lead 

Bind around my aching head.

‘Till I turn from Female love

And root up the Infernal Grove,

I shall never worthy be

To step into Eternity.

‘And, to end thy cruel mocks, 

Annihilate thee on the rocks, 

And another form create 

To be subservient to my fate.

‘Let us agree to give up love, 

And root up the Infernal Grove; 

Then shall we return and see 

The worlds of happy Eternity.

‘And throughout all

Eternity I forgive you, you forgive me. 

As our dear Redeemer said:

“This the Wine, and this the Bread.”

Remember by Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann’d:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Mirror By Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful ‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 

I love thee to the level of every day's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; 

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 

I love with a passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints, -- I love thee with the breath, 

Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) biography :

Born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Romantic Movement. The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica. Educated at home, Elizabeth apparently had read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other great works, before the age of ten. By her twelfth year, she had written her first "epic" poem, which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury. Despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.

In 1826, Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery in England and mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barretts's income, and in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.

Gaining attention for her work in the 1830s, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. During this time, she wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition, she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay, and Browning returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter.

Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier (1878-1942), their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth's health improved and she bore a son, Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch.

Political and social themes embody Elizabeth's later work. She expressed her intense sympathy for the struggle for the unification of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows (1848-1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860). In 1857 Browning published her verse novel Aurora Leigh, which portrays male domination of a woman. In her poetry she also addressed the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines and mills of England, and slavery, among other social injustices. Although this decreased her popularity, Elizabeth was heard and recognized around Europe.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 29, 1861.

Death, be not proud By John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; 

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow 

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, 

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, 

And soonest our best men with thee do go, 

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. 

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, 

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, 

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well 

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? 

One short sleep past, we wake eternally 

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Ezra Pound

After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight

across my forehead

I played at the front gate, pulling

flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing

horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with

blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of

Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or

suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never

looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with

yours

Forever and forever and forever.

Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river

of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise

overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went

out,

By the gate now, the moss is grown,

the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in

wind.

The paired butterflies are already

yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.

If you are coming down through the

narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-sa.

She is Far from the Land by Thomas Moore

She is far from the land, where her young hero sleeps, 

And lovers are round her, sighing; 

But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps, 

For her heart in his grave is lying!

She sings the wild song of her dear native plains, 

Every note which he lov'd awaking

Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains, 

How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking! 

He had lov'd for his love, for his country he died, 

They were all that to life had entwin'd him,

Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried, 

Nor long will his love stay behind him.

Oh! make her a grave, where the sun-beams rest, 

When they promise a glorious morrow; 

They'll shine o'er her sleep, like a smile from the West, 

From her own lov'd Island of sorrow!

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Remember by Christina Rossetti(1830 - 1894)

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.