greykit.poetry — #lyric
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1928
[w-b-yeats]
Sailing to Byzantium
Yeats leaves the country of the young and sensual — dying generations caught in their music — and sails to the holy city of Byzantium, asking its gold-mosaic sages to gather him out of nature into the artifice of eternity, a hammered golden bird singing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
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1919
[w-b-yeats]
The Wild Swans at Coole
On his nineteenth October at Coole Park, Yeats counts fifty-nine swans and watches them mount and scatter — unwearied, their hearts not grown old — and wonders where they will delight men's eyes when he wakes to find they have flown away.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Spring and Fall: to a young child
Hopkins asks Márgarét, weeping at Goldengrove's unleaving, whether she grieves for the world or for herself — sorrow's springs are the same; it is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.
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1902
[thomas-hardy]
The Darkling Thrush
On the last evening of the century, Hardy leans on a gate in a desolate frost-gray landscape when a frail old thrush flings out a full-hearted evensong — suggesting some blessed hope the poet cannot share.
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1896
[emily-dickinson]
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
In the stillness before death, eyes dry, breaths gathering for the last onset — and then a fly interposes with blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz between the light and me, and the windows failed.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Counting his threescore years and ten, the speaker finds fifty springs too few to see the cherry hung with bloom and snow — and resolves to go about the woodlands now.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
To an Athlete Dying Young
A Shropshire lad mourns a young runner carried home shoulder-high in triumph, and again shoulder-high in death — lucky, Housman suggests, to slip away before the garland withers and the name outlives the fame.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
When I was one-and-twenty
A young man ignores the wise man's counsel to keep his heart free — and finds out at two-and-twenty that 't is true, 't is true.
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1891
[emily-dickinson]
Hope" is the thing with feathers—
Hope — the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, sings without words, and never stops — sweetest in the gale, asking never a crumb of me.
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1891
[emily-dickinson]
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
I'm nobody! Who are you? — if there's a pair of us, don't tell; how dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog to tell your name the livelong day to an admiring bog.
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1890
[w-b-yeats]
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Yeats's longing for the simple life on Innisfree — a cabin, nine bean-rows, a hive for the honey-bee — heard even in the deep heart's core while standing on city pavements.
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1887
[robert-louis-stevenson]
Requiem
Stevenson's eight-line epitaph for himself — under the wide and starry sky, glad did I live and gladly die; home is the sailor; home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.
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1885
[robert-louis-stevenson]
From a Railway Carriage
Faster than fairies, faster than witches — bridges, hedges, painted stations, a child gathering brambles, a tramp, a mill and a river: each a glimpse and gone for ever.
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1885
[robert-louis-stevenson]
The Swing
A child swings up in the air so blue — over the wall, over the countryside, down on the garden green — and up in the air and down.
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1881
[oscar-wilde]
Requiescat
Wilde's elegy for his sister Isola, who died aged nine — tread lightly, speak gently; all her bright golden hair tarnished with rust, all his life's buried here.
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1861
[christina-rossetti]
A Birthday
Rossetti's jubilant lyric — the heart like a singing bird, an apple tree, a rainbow shell — all gladder than all these, because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me.
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1860
[walt-whitman]
I Hear America Singing
Whitman hears the varied carols of America — carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker — each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
A Dream within a Dream
Poe asks whether a life lived as a dream is therefore less real — then stands on a surf-tormented shore, watching the golden sands slip through his fingers, unable to save even one grain from the pitiless wave.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Annabel Lee
Poe's last poem — a love that began in a kingdom by the sea, that the winged seraphs envied, that no angels in heaven above nor demons under the sea can ever dissever.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
The Bells
Four movements in sound — silver sleigh-bells, golden wedding-bells, brazen alarm-bells, iron tolling-bells — rising from merriment through alarm to the Ghouls' runic rhyme and the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
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1845
[robert-browning]
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
An exile's longing for an English April — the elm-tree bole in tiny leaf, the chaffinch on the orchard bough, the wise thrush singing each song twice over, the first fine careless rapture.
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1842
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Break, Break, Break
Waves break on cold gray stones — the fisherman's boy shouts, the sailor lad sings, the stately ships go on, but the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.
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1842
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
The Lady of Shalott
Imprisoned in her island tower by a mysterious curse, the Lady of Shalott weaves the world in a mirror until Sir Lancelot's bright passage compels her to look directly at Camelot — and die.
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1830
[lord-byron]
So We'll Go No More a-Roving
Written at twenty-nine after the Venice carnival, Byron's three spare stanzas bid farewell to midnight roving — the sword outwears the sheath, and love itself must rest.
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1821
[lord-byron]
The Isles of Greece
A poem-within-a-poem sung by the anachronistic bard at Lambro's island feast — sixteen stanzas lamenting the fallen glory of Greece, invoking Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae, and urging the living not to drown their shame in Samian wine but to reclaim their inheritance.
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1815
[lord-byron]
She Walks in Beauty
Byron's celebrated lyric of feminine grace, finding in one woman's face the perfect union of dark and bright, inner virtue and outward loveliness.
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1807
[william-wordsworth]
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
A solitary walk past a host of daffodils on a lake shore becomes, in memory, a source of joy that refreshes the poet on his couch in vacant or pensive mood.
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1804
[william-blake]
And did those feet in ancient time
Blake's visionary preface-poem to Milton — a defiant call to rebuild Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land through mental fight.
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1794
[william-blake]
The Tyger
A series of unanswerable questions addressed to the tiger — what immortal daring could have created so fearful and beautiful a creature?
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1789
[william-blake]
The Lamb
A child asks a lamb who made it, then answers the question himself — the same creator who became a little child and bore the name of lamb.