The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and main;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
– The other seeming to look on –
And stands anonymous again
Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances surficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes –
Silks at the start: against the sky
Numbers and parasols: outside,
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass : then the long cry
Hanging unhushed till it subside
To stop-press columns on the street.
Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowd and cries –
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they
Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the grooms, and the grooms boy,
With bridles in the evening come.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Petrarchan Sonnet: If no one else breathed in this wide, wide world by T. Wignesan
- Нина Воронель – Неровен час
- The Lent Lily poem – A. E. Housman
- The Hawk by William Butler Yeats
- Николай Языков – Подражание псалму
- A High-Toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens
- The Progress of Poesy by Thomas Gray
- Medallion by Sylvia Plath
- Эмиль Верхарн – Хвала человеческому телу
- A HYMN TO THE GRACES by Robert Herrick
- A Silence poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
- An Evening Song. by Sidney Lanier
- Владимир Высоцкий – Случай на таможне
- The Sacrifice Of Iphigenia
- Johnnie Armstrang poem – Andrew Lang poems
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985), Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Cavalier of the Order of the Companions of Honour, was an English poet, novelist, and librarian.