Heaven–Haven: A Nun Takes The Veil poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
I have desired to go Where springs not fail, To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow. And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea. […]
Harry Ploughman poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank— Head and foot, shoulder and shank— By a grey eye’s heed steered well, one crew, fall to; Stand at stress. Each limb’s barrowy brawn, his thew That onewhere […]
God’s Grandeur poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with […]
For A Picture Of St. Dorothea poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
I bear a basket lined with grass; I am so light, I am so fair, That men must wonder as I pass And at the basket that I bear, Where in a newly-drawn green litter Sweet flowers I carry, — sweets for bitter. Lilies I shew you, lilies none, None in Caesar’s gardens […]
Felix Randal poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and […]
Epithalamion poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Hark, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood, Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave, That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between Roots and rocks […]
Easter Communion poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast: God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips. You striped in secret with breath-taking whips, Those crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced To crosses meant for Jesu’s; you whom the East With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships, You […]
Duns Scotus’s Oxford poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers; Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural […]
Denis poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Denis, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit Caps occasion with an intellectual fit. Yet Arthur is a Bowman: his three-heeled timber ’ll hit The bald and b?ld bl?nking gold when ?ll ’s d?ne Right rooting in the bare butt’s wincing navel in the sight of the sun. . . . . . . . […]
Cheery Beggar poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Beyond M?gdalen and by the Bridge, on a place called there the Plain, In Summer, in a burst of summertime Following falls and falls of rain, When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime; . . . . . . . . […]
Carrion Comfort poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ?r, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me […]
Brothers poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
How lovely the elder brother’s Life all laced in the other’s, Lóve-laced!—what once I well Witnessed; so fortune fell. When Shrovetide, two years gone, Our boys’ plays brought on Part was picked for John, Young Jóhn: then fear, then joy Ran revel in the elder boy. Their night was come now; all Our company […]
Binsey Poplars poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
felled 1879 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if […]
Barnfloor and Winepress poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress? 2 Kings VI: 27 Thou that on sin’s wages starvest, Behold we have the joy in harvest: For us was gather’d the first fruits, For us was lifted from […]
At The Wedding March poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
God with honour hang your head, Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed With lissome scions, sweet scions, Out of hallowed bodies bred. Each be other’s comfort kind: Déep, déeper than divined, Divine charity, dear charity, Fast you ever, fast bind. Then let the March tread our ears: I to him turn with […]
Ash-Boughs poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
a. Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world, Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky. Say it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled Fast ?r they in clammyish lashtender combs creep […]
As Kingfishers Catch Fire poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes […]
Andromeda poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude, With not her either beauty’s equal or Her injury’s, looks off by both horns of shore, Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon’s food. Time past she has been attempted and pursued By many blows and banes; but now hears roar A wilder beast from West […]
You Ask Me, Why, Tho’ Ill at Ease poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease, Within this region I subsist, Whose spirits falter in the mist, And languish for the purple seas. It is the land that freemen till, That sober-suited Freedom chose, The land, where girt with friends or foes A man may speak the thing he will; A land […]
Ulysses poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times […]
To Virgil, Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the N poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre; Landscape-lover, lord of language more than he that sang the “Works and Days,” All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase; Thou that singest wheat and woodland, […]
To Virgil poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre; Landscape-lover, lord of language more than he that sang the Works and Days, All the chosen coin […]
To The Queen poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
O loyal to the royal in thyself, And loyal to thy land, as this to thee– Bear witness, that rememberable day, When, pale as yet, and fever-worn, the Prince Who scarce had plucked his flickering life again From halfway down the shadow of the grave, Past with thee through thy people and their love, […]
To J. S. poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
The wind, that beats the mountain, blows More softly round the open wold, And gently comes the world to those That are cast in gentle mould. And me this knowledge bolder made, Or else I had not dare to flow In these words toward you, and invade Even with a verse your holy woe. […]
To E. Fitzgerald: Tiresias poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
OLD FITZ, who from your suburb grange, Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling orb of change, And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see as there you sit Beneath your sheltering garden-tree, And watch your doves about you flit, And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee, […]
Tithonus poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair’d […]
The Talking Oak poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
Once more the gate behind me falls; Once more before my face I see the moulder’d Abbey-walls, That stand within the chace. Beyond the lodge the city lies, Beneath its drift of smoke; And ah! with what delighted eyes I turn to yonder oak. For when my passion first began, Ere that, which […]
The Ringlet poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
‘Your ringlets, your ringlets, That look so golden-gay, If you will give me one, but one, To kiss it night and day, The never chilling touch of Time Will turn it silver-gray; And then shall I know it is all true gold To flame and sparkle and stream as of old. Till all the […]
The Revenge; A Ballad of the Fleet poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away: ‘Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted’ Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: ”Fore God I am no coward; But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear, […]
The Progress of Spring poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
THE groundflame of the crocus breaks the mould, Fair Spring slides hither o’er the Southern sea, Wavers on her thin stem the snowdrop cold That trembles not to kisses of the bee: Come Spring, for now from all the dripping eaves The spear of ice has wept itself away, And hour by hour unfolding […]
The Princess (The Conclusion) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
So closed our tale, of which I give you all The random scheme as wildly as it rose: The words are mostly mine; for when we ceased There came a minute’s pause, and Walter said, ‘I wish she had not yielded!’ then to me, ‘What, if you drest it up poetically?’ So prayed the […]
The Princess (prologue) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
Sir Walter Vivian all a summer’s day Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun Up to the people: thither flocked at noon His tenants, wife and child, and thither half The neighbouring borough with their Institute Of which he was the patron. I was there From college, visiting the son,–the son A […]
The Princess (part 7) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
So was their sanctuary violated, So their fair college turned to hospital; At first with all confusion: by and by Sweet order lived again with other laws: A kindlier influence reigned; and everywhere Low voices with the ministering hand Hung round the sick: the maidens came, they talked, They sang, they read: till she […]
The Princess (part 6) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
My dream had never died or lived again. As in some mystic middle state I lay; Seeing I saw not, hearing not I heard: Though, if I saw not, yet they told me all So often that I speak as having seen. For so it seemed, or so they said to me, That all […]
The Princess (part 5) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
Now, scarce three paces measured from the mound, We stumbled on a stationary voice, And ‘Stand, who goes?’ ‘Two from the palace’ I. ‘The second two: they wait,’ he said, ‘pass on; His Highness wakes:’ and one, that clashed in arms, By glimmering lanes and walls of canvas led Threading the soldier-city, till we […]
The Princess (part 4) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
‘There sinks the nebulous star we call the Sun, If that hypothesis of theirs be sound’ Said Ida; ‘let us down and rest;’ and we Down from the lean and wrinkled precipices, By every coppice-feathered chasm and cleft, Dropt through the ambrosial gloom to where below No bigger than a glow-worm shone the tent […]
The Princess (part 3) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
Morn in the wake of the morning star Came furrowing all the orient into gold. We rose, and each by other drest with care Descended to the court that lay three parts In shadow, but the Muses’ heads were touched Above the darkness from their native East. There while we stood beside the fount, […]
The Princess (part 2) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
At break of day the College Portress came: She brought us Academic silks, in hue The lilac, with a silken hood to each, And zoned with gold; and now when these were on, And we as rich as moths from dusk cocoons, She, curtseying her obeisance, let us know The Princess Ida waited: out […]
The Princess (part 1) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
A prince I was, blue-eyed, and fair in face, Of temper amorous, as the first of May, With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl, For on my cradle shone the Northern star. There lived an ancient legend in our house. Some sorcerer, whom a far-off grandsire burnt Because he cast no shadow, had […]
The Princess: A Medley: Thy Voice is Heard poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
Thy voice is heard thro’ rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands; Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine […]