True Poems, with a Morrissey flavour

Cats


Cats sleep, anywhere,
Any table, any chair
Top of piano, window-ledge,
In the middle, on the edge,
Open drawer, empty shoe,
Anybody's lap will do,
Fitted in a cardboard box,
In the cupboard, with your frocks-
Anywhere! They don't care!
Cats sleep anywhere.
- Eleanor Farjeon

in keeping with this threads unasked for theme (lol) your post reminded me of this ..,


‘Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.’ - Christopher Hitchens
 

The Darkling Thrush​

BY THOMAS HARDY
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
 

Ode to a Nightingale​

BY JOHN KEATS
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
 

Dover Beach​

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
 
these are all the poems i know by heart that i can remember off of the top of my head!!

a valediction forbidding mourning - john donne
death be not proud - john donne
dream song 29 - john berryman
to my wife - oscar wilde
elegy written in a country churchyard - thomas gray
jabberwocky - lewis carroll
bright star, would i were steadfast as thou art - john keats
on the sale by auction of keats love letters - oscar wilde
ozymandias - percy bysshe shelley
meditation XVII - john donne
the lady of shallot - alfred, lord tennyson
my last duchess - robert browning
the road not taken - robert frost
after great pain a formal feeling comes - emily dickinson
scirocco - jorie graham
a father at his sons baptism - amy gerstler
anyone lived in a pretty how town - ee cummings
in just - ee cummings
the boys i mean are not refined - ee cummings
the boys i mean (a response to ee cummings) - julia goldberg
ode on a grecian urn - john keats
ode to psyche - john keats
she walks in beauty - lord byron
ulysses - alfred, lord tennyson
spinster - sylvia plath
fever 103 - sylvia plath
stillborn - sylvia plath
maenad - sylvia plath
wanting to die - anne sexton
the second coming - WB Yeats
musee des beaux arts - wh auden
invictus - william henley
the song of wandering aengus - WB yeats
prometheus - goethe
dulce et decorum est - wilfred owen
dont hesitate to ask - michael faber
the tender place - ted hughes
sonnet to liberty - oscar wilde
sonnet 73 - shakespeare
sonnet 18 - shakespeare
sonnet 116 - shakespeare
the world is too much with us - william wordsworth
on his blindness - john milton
elm - sylvia plath
marys song - sylvia plath
siren song - margaret atwood
acquainted with the night - robert frost
i carry your heart with me - ee cummings
daddy - sylvia plath
lady lazarus - sylvia plath
cut - sylvia plath
little fugue - sylvia plath
you, doctor martin - anne sexton
do not go gentle into that good night - dylan thomas
huge swaths of 'the ballad of reading gaol' - oscar wilde
 
these are all the poems i know by heart that i can remember off of the top of my head!!

a valediction forbidding mourning - john donne
death be not proud - john donne
dream song 29 - john berryman
to my wife - oscar wilde
elegy written in a country churchyard - thomas gray
jabberwocky - lewis carroll
bright star, would i were steadfast as thou art - john keats
on the sale by auction of keats love letters - oscar wilde
ozymandias - percy bysshe shelley
meditation XVII - john donne
the lady of shallot - alfred, lord tennyson
my last duchess - robert browning
the road not taken - robert frost
after great pain a formal feeling comes - emily dickinson
scirocco - jorie graham
a father at his sons baptism - amy gerstler
anyone lived in a pretty how town - ee cummings
in just - ee cummings
the boys i mean are not refined - ee cummings
the boys i mean (a response to ee cummings) - julia goldberg
ode on a grecian urn - john keats
ode to psyche - john keats
she walks in beauty - lord byron
ulysses - alfred, lord tennyson
spinster - sylvia plath
fever 103 - sylvia plath
stillborn - sylvia plath
maenad - sylvia plath
wanting to die - anne sexton
the second coming - WB Yeats
musee des beaux arts - wh auden
invictus - william henley
the song of wandering aengus - WB yeats
prometheus - goethe
dulce et decorum est - wilfred owen
dont hesitate to ask - michael faber
the tender place - ted hughes
sonnet to liberty - oscar wilde
sonnet 73 - shakespeare
sonnet 18 - shakespeare
sonnet 116 - shakespeare
the world is too much with us - william wordsworth
on his blindness - john milton
elm - sylvia plath
marys song - sylvia plath
siren song - margaret atwood
acquainted with the night - robert frost
i carry your heart with me - ee cummings
daddy - sylvia plath
lady lazarus - sylvia plath
cut - sylvia plath
little fugue - sylvia plath
you, doctor martin - anne sexton
do not go gentle into that good night - dylan thomas
huge swaths of 'the ballad of reading gaol' - oscar wilde
There's not even one poem I can remember.
 
BAT


His awful skin
stretched out by some tradesman
is like my skin, here between my fingers,
a kind of webbing, a kind of frog.
Surely when first born my face was this tiny
and before I was born surely I could fly.
Not well, mind you, only a veil of skin
from my arms to my waist.
I flew at night, too. Not to be seen
for if I were I'd be taken down.
In August perhaps as the trees rose to the stars
I have flown from leaf to leaf in the thick dark.
If you had caught me with your flashlight
you would have seen a pink corpse with wings,
out, out, from her mother's belly, all furry
and hoarse skimming over the houses, the armies.
That's why the dogs of your house sniff me.
They know I'm something to be caught
somewhere in the cemetery hanging upside down
like a misshapen udder.

- Sexton
 
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This one kind of hit me with the last part cause I didn't think I'd have written something that flowery and then I read the end, and 'oh yeah.'
 
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