greykit.poetry — #nature
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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]
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God — yet men sear and smear the soil, shod from feeling it; and yet the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world with warm breast and bright wings.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Pied Beauty
A curtal sonnet of thanksgiving for dappled things — brinded skies, rose-moles on trout, finches' wings, landscape plotted and pieced — all fathered-forth by a beauty past change.
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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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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
The Windhover
Watching a kestrel ride the morning wind, Hopkins finds mastery — the achieve of the thing — that buckles into the beauty of Christ; even the plough-share, shéer plód, flashes gold-vermillion.
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1910
[rudyard-kipling]
The Way Through the Woods
A road the forest swallowed — and the ghosts you can almost hear still riding it.
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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
[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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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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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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1863
[william-blake]
Auguries of Innocence
Blake's great chain of auguries — 132 lines of compressed vision reading the infinite in the finite: a world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wildflower, and the tyranny we inflict on the smallest creatures reverberating through all of human life.
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1855
[walt-whitman]
Song of Myself
Whitman's great democratic epic — celebrating himself, and through himself, every atom of every person — sprawling across 52 sections from the grass at his feet to the spotted hawk's yawp over the roofs of the world.
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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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1838
[john-keats]
Bright Star
Keats's last sonnet — not to be fixed in lone, patient, priestlike vigil like the star, but steadfast in one thing: pillowed upon his fair love's ripening breast, awake forever in a sweet unrest, or else swoon to death.
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1820
[john-keats]
Ode to a Nightingale
Keats follows a nightingale's song out of the mortal world into an immortal darkness, then wakes to find the vision fled — was it a dream or a waking?
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1820
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ode to the West Wind
In five linked terza rima sonnets, Shelley invokes the autumn West Wind — destroyer and preserver — begging it to scatter his words over the earth as seeds of prophecy.
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1820
[john-keats]
To Autumn
Three stanzas address Autumn as a season and a presence — first as conspirer with the sun, then as a harvest figure at rest, and finally as maker of its own music in the dying day.
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1818
[lord-byron]
Apostrophe to the Ocean
Seven Spenserian stanzas from the close of Canto IV — Byron's famous apostrophe to the sea as the one force man cannot despoil, the "image of Eternity," ending with the poet's declaration that he has loved the ocean since boyhood and lays his hand upon its mane.
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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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1802
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
Dejection: An Ode
Wrestling with creative paralysis and emotional deadness, Coleridge addresses an unnamed Lady, lamenting that joy must come from within the soul before it can be found in nature.
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1798
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
Frost at Midnight
Alone with his sleeping infant at midnight, Coleridge meditates on frost, childhood memory, and the life of open wonder he wishes for his son.
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1798
[william-wordsworth]
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798
Revisiting the Wye valley after five years, Wordsworth traces how nature's forms have sustained him in absence and shaped his moral being, closing with a prayer for his sister Dorothy.
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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?