Poems

• Songs

• https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/18/poetry-monday-evolution-by-langdon-smith/#comment-8712449

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Anonymous

• The President Poem

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Baudelaire

Harmonie du soir, https://fleursdumal.org/poem/142

 
Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! ...

Ross Coggins

From a Steve Sailer blogpost that quotes it:

 
Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet
I’m off to join the Development Set;
My bags are packed, and I’ve had all my shots
I have traveller’s checks and pills for the trots!
 
The Development Set is bright and noble
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes
Our thoughts are always with the masses.

[many more stanzas]

Dante Alighieri

https://www.fulltextarchive.com/pdfs/Dante-s-Inferno.pdf canto 5, Longfellow translation:

 
When I made answer, I began: "Alas!
How many pleasant thoughts, how much desire,
Conducted these unto the dolorous pass!"
 
Then unto them I turned me, and I spake,
And I began: "Thine agonies, Francesca,
Sad and compassionate to weeping make me.
 
But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs,
By what and in what manner Love conceded,
That you should know your dubious desires?"
 
And she to me: "There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
 
But, if to recognise the earliest root
Of love in us thou hast so great desire,
I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.
 
One day we reading were for our delight
Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthral.
Alone we were and without any fear.
 
Full many a time our eyes together drew
That reading, and drove the colour from our faces;
But one point only was it that o'ercame us.
 
When as we read of the much-longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
 
Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein."

Frost, Robert

The Road Not Taken

 
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
 
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
 
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
 
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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Hugo

LES DJINNS (https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/3739)

 
Murs, ville
Et port,
Asile
De mort,
Mer grise
Où brise
La brise
Tout dort.

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Hephsiba R Korlapati and Eric Rasmusen

A Poem for January

"Sun, sun, stay this way;
Keep us happy all the day.
Not as striking as in May,
Now that winter's come to stay,
But you help us so to play."

Write first with any quill,
Then edit with full will.
To wait will paralyze--
But endlessly revise.

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Holderlin

Patmos

http://www.sternenfall.de/H0366lderlin--Patmos.html

Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch.
Im Finstern wohnen
Die Adler und furchtlos gehn
Die Söhne der Alpen über den Abgrund weg
Auf leichtgebaueten Brücken.

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Keith, Mike

Cadaeic Cadenza
A Pilish short story
Mike Keith, 1996, http://www.cadaeic.net/cadenza.htm  
One
A Poem  
A Raven  

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary,
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".
 
Perfectly, the intellect remembers: the ghostly fires, a glittering ember.
Inflamed by lightning's outbursts, windows cast penumbras upon this floor.
Sorrowful, as one mistreated, unhappy thoughts I heeded:
That inimitable lesson in elegance - Lenore -
Is delighting, exciting...nevermore....

Three
Of Carrolls

Jabwocky

Slithy toves, borogove
Gimbled there all out in strathwabe
Mimified and gyrified,
A rath is outergrabe...

Seven
Prufrock

Let us depart then,
While eventide's withering skies threaten,
Impersonating the sufferers etherising upon pallets;...

Nine
O Ruby Yachts

Poetic Muses alongside th' Bough
An oversupply o' Wine, possessed somehow
Thou with me treading Eden's Wilderness
Through all it seems a Paradise enough!...

Eleven
William Shakespeare's tragedy King Claudius

[Fifth (terminal) Act]

. . . . So it is - deceased tanners a-populate the earth in multitudes. Wherefore? The skins are callously tanned! Here's, gravely, th' skull - O! - of a celebrated confrere.

HAM. Whose? Prithee, interpret.

A CLOWN. A mad fellow, foolhardy whoreson. Methinks he oftentimes frolicked i' your path....

Thirteen
Sandburg's Grass

Caskets piled beneath Austerlitzes, Dresdens
As, silently uplifting, blanketing, grass
Disguises it all, it all.

And as fierce Gettysburg witnesses,
Evident at Champagne, Falklands, Jutland,
I am grassiness, settling ever thus...

Longfellow

Excelsior, https://www.bartleby.com/102/62.html Excelsior:

 
THE SHADES of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
                                          Excelsior!...

Millay

Dirge Without Music, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52773/dirge-without-music

 
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned...

Milne

"The Dormouse And The Doctor:"

 
...The Dormouse lay happy, his eyes were so tight
He could see no chrysanthemums, yellow or white.
And all that he felt at the back of his head
Were delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).

 
And that is the reason (Aunt Emily said)
If a Dormouse gets in a chrysanthemum bed,
You will find (so Aunt Emily says) that he lies
Fast asleep on his front with his paws to his eyes.

Paterson

Clancy of the Overflow (http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/patersonab/poetry/clancy.html)

 
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just "on spec", addressed as follows: "Clancy, of The Overflow"...

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Langdon Smith

Evolution ( https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/int/evolution.html; see also https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/18/poetry-monday-evolution-by-langdon-smith/)

 
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then…

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Richard Wilbur (1921–2017)

“What is the opposite of riot? / It’s lots of people keeping quiet.”

“The opposite of opposite? / That’s much too difficult. I quit.”

Wordsworth

March 13, 2021, Bloomington, Indiana.

This is the day of the daffodil.

I almost said "This is the day of the daffodils," but I don't like to exaggerate.

I think it ought to be the last line of each stanza of a poem.

It could pair with Wordsworth's[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"].

Poems To Write

"This is the day of the daffodil." March 13, 2021, Bloomington, Indiana.

I almost said "This is the day of the daffodils," but I don't like to exaggerate.

I think it ought to be the last line of each stanza of a poem. Recall Wordsworth's [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"].

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