Change Upon Change (English Poet Series)

Change Upon Change

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Five months ago the stream did flow,
The lilies bloomed within the sedge,
And we were lingering to and fro,
Where none will track thee in this snow,
Along the stream, beside the hedge.
Ah, Sweet, be free to love and go!
For if I do not hear thy foot,
The frozen river is as mute,
The flowers have dried down to the root:
And why, since these be changed since May,
Shouldst thou change less than they.

And slow, slow as the winter snow
The tears have drifted to mine eyes;
And my poor cheeks, five months ago
Set blushing at thy praises so,
Put paleness on for a disguise.
Ah, Sweet, be free to praise and go!
For if my face is turned too pale,
It was thine oath that first did fail, --
It was thy love proved false and frail, --
And why, since these be changed enow,
Should I change less than thou.

Growing Old (English Poet Series)

Growing Old

by Matthew Arnold


What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?

Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!

'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more!

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

Think of the Unsatisfied Ones

Think of the Unsatisfied Ones

By Gottfried Benn


When despair—
you who enjoyed great triumphs
and walked with confidence and the memory
of many gifts of delirium and dawns
and unexpected
turns—
when despair wants you in its grip,
and threatens you from some unfathomable depth
with destruction
and the guttering out of your flame:

then think of the unsatisfied ones,
with their migraine-prone temples and introverted dispositions,
loyal to a few memories
that held out little hope,
who still bought flowers,
and with a smile of not much luminosity
confided secret desires
to their small-scale heavens
that were soon to be extinguished.

Sometimes.....

Poem of the Day - Alone

Alone

by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then--in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Poem of the Day - Mise Raifteirí an File

Mise Raifteirí an File
(I am Raftery, the poet)

by Antoine Ó Raifteirí

I am Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love,
With eyes without light,
Calm without anguish.

Going back in my travels
With the light of my heart
Weary and tired
To the end of my journey.

Look at me now
And my back to the wall,
Playing music
To empty pockets.

Poem of the Day - The Ballad of Reading Gaol

The Ballad of Reading Gaol
In Memoriam
C.T.W.
Sometime Trooper of
The Royal Horse Guards.
Obiit H.M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire,
July 7th, 1896

by Oscar Wilde

I

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby gray;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
"That fellow's got to swing."

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what haunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Poem of the Day - Raglan Road

Raglan Road

by Patrick Kavanagh

On Raglan Road of an autumn day I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed along the enchanted way
And I said let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's play
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay
Oh I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret signs
That's known to the artists who have known the true Gods of sound and stone
And words and tint without stint, I gave her poems to say
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should a creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay he'll lose his wings at the dawn of day


More about Patrick Kavanagh

Poem of the Day - Mid-Term Break

Mid-Term Break

by Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying?
He had always taken funerals in his stride?
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble",
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.


About the Poem

Seamus Heaney wrote this poem as a reflection on the death of his infant brother, Christopher, who died in a car accident in 1953 when Heaney was fourteen.

"I wasn't there on the evening it happened, but I do have a clear picture of it in my mind. It was at the bus stop a little up the road from our lane. Christopher and my brother Hugh were on one side of the road, posting a letter on the bus for Belfast - it used to be you could hand a letter to the conductor and it would be mailed later that evening in the city; it saved a trip to the post office.

Anyhow, at that same moment, my brothers Pat and Dan were walking up the road on the other side, on an errand to fetch a gallon of paraffin oil from a house further along. As the bus moves off, Christopher - who is three and a half years old - sees the two boys on the other side and immediately starts across the road towards them. But while the bus is pulling away, a car is coming in the opposite direction, and Christopher runs out from behind the bus straight into the side of the car and is knocked down. The driver hadn't a chance.

What happens next I can hardly bear to think about: Hugh lifts him and holds him, bleeding and probably unconscious; then the man who is a passenger in the car comes and takes Christopher and carries him the thirty or forty yards to our lane, Hugh behind him, weeping al the time. My mother who is out at the clothes line, hears it and comes around to the street and sees what has happened. All in a few minutes.

He was taken to the mid-Ulster Hospital in Magherafelt and died a couple of hours later."

More about Seamus Heaney