A Divine Image

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

William Blake

Ah, how sweet it is to love!

AH, how sweet it is to love!
Ah, how gay is young Desire!
And what pleasing pains we prove
When we first approach Love's fire!
Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.

Sighs which are from lovers blown
Do but gently heave the heart:
Ev'n the tears they shed alone
Cure, like trickling balm, their smart:
Lovers, when they lose their breath,
Bleed away in easy death.

Love and Time with reverence use,
Treat them like a parting friend;
Nor the golden gifts refuse
Which in youth sincere they send:
For each year their price is more,
And they less simple than before.

Love, like spring-tides full and high,
Swells in every youthful vein;
But each tide does less supply,
Till they quite shrink in again:
If a flow in age appear,
'Tis but rain, and runs not clear.

John Henry Dryden

God's Grandeur - Gerard Manley Hopkins

By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,

It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck His rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
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And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And bears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
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And though the last lights from the black west went,

Oh, morning at the brown brink eastwards springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast, and with, ah, bright wings.

A Noiseless Patient Spidera poem by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Keep In Mind - Halina Poswiatowska

Keep in Mind


if you die
I won't put on a lilac dress
won't buy, colored wreaths
with whispering wind in the ribbons
none of that
none

the hearse will come - will come
the hearse will go - will go
I'll stand at the window - I'll look
wave my hand
flutter my handkerchief
bid farewell
alone in that window

and in summer
in crazy May
I will lie down on the grass
warm grass
and with my hands will touch your hair
and with my lips will touch a bee's pelt
prickly and beautiful
like your smile
like dusk

later it will be
silver - golden
perhaps golden and only red
for that duskthat wind
which whispers love into grasses
stubbornly whispers love
will not allow me to rise
and go
so simply
to my cursed deserted house