Revenente
Henry Treece

The bells of memory sound this summer day
Down the long alleys of the blue-skied years;
Shy cowslip, thyme, the haunting scent of hay,
Pleached gardens nourished by a lover's tears,
And honeysuckle, shy maid in the hedge,
Are all Her handmaids; blessed is the sight
The mirror-pool caught of Her. So the stage
Is set for entrance, and a girl in white
Walks in my heart again, out of pale death,
Kingdom of shrivelled mouth and powdering bone,
Touching my cheek with flower-laden breath,
And whispering, 'Poor love, and still alone?'
Was any man so lucky, dear God?
It will be dawn before She takes the road.                             

Some Poetry
Freda Downie

Poetry is a loose term and only
A fool would offer a definition.
Those not concerned with the form
At all usually refer to some
Beautiful manifestation or the other.

Chopin, dying in hellish foggy London,
Wrote to say he was leaving for
Paris to finish the ultimate act,
Begging Grzymala to make his room ready
And not to forget a bunch of violets
So that he would have a little poetry
Around him when he returned.

I like to think the violets were
Easily obtainable and that the poetry
Was there, on the table, breathing
Wordless volumes for one too tired
To turn pages while moving swiftly
Towards an inevitable incomprehensible form.

A Code Poem
Leo Marks

The life that I have is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have,
Yet death will be but a pause,
For the peace of my years in the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

It is too late to call thee now:
Emily Bronte

It is too late to call thee now:
I will not nurse that dream again;
For every joy that lit my brow
Would bring its after-storm of pain.

Besides the mist is half withdrawn;
The barren mountain-side lies bare;
And sunshine and awaking morn
Paint no more golden visions there.

Yet ever in my grateful breast,
Thy darling shade shall cherished be;
For God alone doth know how blessed
My early years have been in thee!

Song
Anne Bronte

We know where deepest lies the snow,
And where the frost-winds keenest blow,
O'er every mountain's brow,
We long have known and learnt to bear
The wandering outlaw's toil and care,
But where we late were hunted, there
Our foes are hunted now.
We have their princely homes, and they
To our wild haunts are chased away,
Dark woods, and desert caves.
And we can range from hill to hill,
And chase our vanquished victors still;
Small respite will they find until
They slumber in their graves.

But I would rather be the hare,
That crouching in its sheltered lair
Must start at every sound;
That forced from cornfields waving wide
Is driven to seek the bare hillside,
Or in the tangled copse to hide,
Than be the hunter's hound.                             

A Farewell (part only)
Matthew Arnold

My horse's feet beside the lake,
Where sweet the unbroken moonbeams lay,
Sent echoes through the night to wake,
Each glistening strand, each heath-fringed bay.

The poplar avenue was passed,
And the roofed bridge that spans the stream,
Up the steep street I hurried fast,
Led by thy taper's starlike beam.

I came! I saw thee rise! - the blood
Poured flushing to thy languid cheek.
Locked in each other's arms we stood,
In tears, with hearts too full to speak.

Days flew; ah, soon I could discern
A trouble in thine altered air!
Thy hand lay languidly in mine,
Thy cheek was grave, thy speech grew rare.

I blame thee not! - This heart, I know,
To be long loved was never framed,
For something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untamed.

And women - things that live and move
Mined by the fever of the soul -
They seek to find in those they love
Stern strength, and promise of control.

They ask not kindness, gentle ways -
These they themselves have tried and known;
They ask a soul which never sways
With the blind gusts that shake their own.

Nocturn
Francis Thompson

I walk, I only,
Not I only wake;
Nothing is, this sweet night,
But doth couch and wake
For its love's sake;
Everything, this sweet night,
Couches with its mate.
For whom but for the stealthy-visitant sun
Is the naked moon
Tremulous and elate?
The heaven hath the earth
Its own and all apart;
The hushéd pool holdeth
A star to its heart.
You may think the rose sleepeth,
But though she folded is,
The wind doubts her sleeping;
Not all the rose sleeps,
But smiles in her sweet heart
For crafty bliss.
The wind lieth with the rose,
And when he stirs, she stirs in her repose:
The wind hath the rose,
And the rose her kiss.
Ah, mouth of me!
Is it then that this
Seemeth much to thee?—
I wander only.
The rose hath her kiss.

A Tower By The Yangzi River
Du Mu

Alone, I pour out spring wine,
then climb the tower half tipsy.
Who startled the line of geese
that broke through the Yangzi clouds?

Roe-Deer
Ted Hughes

In the dawn's early light, in the the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

They had happened into my dimension
The moment I was arriving just there.

They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood
Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal

And hesitated in the all-way disintegration
And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign

That the curtain had blown aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

The deer had come for me.

Then they ducked thru the hedge, and upright they rode their legs
Away downhill over snow-lonely field

Towards tree dark--finally
Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

Into the boil of big flakes.
The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well

Revising its dawn inspiration
Back to the ordinary.

Too Late Matthew Arnold   EACH on his own strict line we move,
And some find death ere they find love.
So far apart their lives are thrown
From the twin soul that halves their own.
And sometimes, by still harder fate,
The lovers meet, but meet too late.
—Thy heart is mine!—True, true! ah true!
—Then, love, thy hand!—Ah no! adieu!

Threatened Tears
Francis Thompson

Do not loose those rains thy wet
Eyes, my Fair, unsurely threat;
Do not, Sweet, do not so!
Thou canst not have a single woe,
But this sad and doubtful weather
Overcasts us both together.
In the aspect of those known eyes
My soul's a captain weatherwise.
Ah me! what presages it sees
In those watery Hyades.

Farewell To The Court
Sir Walter Raleigh

Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expir'd,
And past return are all my dandled days;
My love misled, and fancy quite retir'd--
Of all which pass'd the sorrow only stays.

My lost delights, now clean from sight of land,
Have left me all alone in unknown ways;
My mind to woe, my life in fortune's hand--
Of all which pass'd the sorrow only stays.

As in a country strange, without companion,
I only wail the wrong of death's delays,
Whose sweet spring spent, whose summer well-nigh done--
Of all which pass'd only the sorrow stays.

Whom care forewarns, ere age and winter cold,
To haste me hence to find my fortune's fold.