From fairest creatures we desire increase

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory:

But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1

“Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” by John Donne

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,

The intelligence that moves, devotion is,

And as the other Spheares, by being growne

Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,

And being by others hurried every day,

Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:

Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit

For their first mover, and are whirld by it.

Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West

This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.

There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,

And by that setting endlesse day beget;

But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,

Sinne had eternally benighted all. Continue reading Let Man’s Soul Be a Sphere →

Franks links to a new poem by a Polish poet on reading what she wrote as a teenager.

LET me thy properties explain:

A rotten cabin dropping rain:

Chimneys, with scorn rejecting smoke;

Stools, tables, chairs, and bedsteads broke.

Here elements have lost their uses,

Air ripens not, nor earth produces:

In vain we make poor Sheelah toil,

Fire will not roast, nor water boil.

Through all the valleys, hills, and plains,

The Goddess Want, in triumph reigns:

And her chief officers of state,

Sloth, Dirt, and Theft, around her wait.

“On An Ill-Managed House” By Jonathan Swift

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats, written in a time of economic and political turmoil.

All I know is a door into the dark.

Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;

Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,

The unpredictable fantail of sparks

Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,

Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,

Set there immoveable: an altar

Where he expends himself in shape and music.

Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,

He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter

Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;

Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick

To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

Read more from this great Irish poet here.

On ear and ear two noises too old to end

Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;

With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,

Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,

His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score

In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour

And pelt music, till none ’s to spill nor spend.

How these two shame this shallow and frail town!

How ring right out our sordid turbid time,

Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,

Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:

Our make and making break, are breaking, down

To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.

“The Sea and the Skylark” by Gerard Manley Hopkins