Full name: Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics

Author: Bliss Carman Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Poetry, Free books Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon Google Books Project Gutenberg LibraryThing ISBNs: 9781406512847 1406512842

Excerpt: ... greyness, Are my long thoughts of thee. How should thy friend fear the seasons? They only perish of winter 10 Whom Love, audacious and tender, Never hath visited. LXVIII You ask how love can keep the mortal soul Strong to the pitch of joy throughout the years. Ask how your brave cicada on the bough Keeps the long sweet insistence of his cry; Ask how the Pleiads steer across the night 5 In their serene unswerving mighty course; Ask how the wood-flowers waken to the sun, Unsummoned save by some mysterious word; Ask how the wandering swallows find your eaves Upon the rain-wind with returning spring; 10 Ask who commands the ever-punctual tide To keep the pendulous rhythm of the sea; And you shall know what leads the heart of man To the far haven of his hopes and fears. LXIX Like a tall forest were their spears, Their banners like a silken sea, When the great host in splendour passed Across the crimson sinking sun. And then the bray of brazen horns 5 Arose above their clanking march, As the long waving column filed Into the odorous purple dusk. O lover, in this radiant world Whence is the race of mortal men, 10 So frail, so mighty, and so fond, That fleets into the vast unknown? LXX My lover smiled, "O friend, ask not The journey's end, nor whence we are. That whistling boy who minds his goats So idly in the grey ravine, "The brown-backed rower drenched with spray, 5 The lemon-seller in the street, And the young girl who keeps her first Wild love-tryst at the rising moon, - "Lo, these are wiser than the wise. And not for all our questioning 10 Shall we discover more than joy, Nor find a better thing than love! "Let pass the banners and the spears, The hate, the battle, and the greed; For greater than all gifts is peace, 15 And strength is in the tranquil mind." LXXI Ye who have the stable world In the keeping of your hands. Flocks and men, the lasting hills, And the ever-wheeling stars; Ye who freight with wondrous things 5 The wide-wandering heart of... Similar books: The Far Field by Theodore Roethke Garbage by A. R. Ammons Lighthead by Terrance Hayes The Bridge by Hart Crane Actual Air by David Berman Spring and All by William Carlos Williams Words Under the Words by Naomi Shihab Nye The Lives of the Heart by Jane Hirshfield The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot The Leaf and the Cloud by Mary Oliver The Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost Crush by Richard Siken Citizen by Claudia Rankine Pillow Thoughts by Courtney Peppernell