Browsing the archives for the dead british guys category

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”

Just finished watching Dead Poets Society, a favorite of mine, only to look out the window at the ethereal blue snow and the moon, so large and almost full, up in the sky. It’s been awhile since there’s been a clear night. Checking the calendar, the full moon comes on New Year’s Eve – a [...]

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Ted Hughes, “Christmas Card”

You have anti-freeze in the car, yes,
   But the shivering stars wade deeper.
Your scarf’s tucked in under your buttons,
   But a dry snow ticks through the stubble.
Your knee-boots gleam in the fashion,
   But the moon must stay
      And stamp and cry
      As the holly the holly
      Hots its reds.
Electric blanket to comfort your bedtime
   The rover no longer feels its stones.
Your windows [...]

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“Collected Poems”

There is no greater phrase to a poetry enthusiast. There is nothing so satisfying as picking up a single thick slab of poetry, and saying, this is what this person was (or “is,” maybe). Just look at this one I picked up the other day:

That is a serious chunk of poetry right there son! Five [...]

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Philip Larkin, “Aubade”

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes [...]

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Ted Hughes, “Wind”

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I [...]

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A.E. Housman, Nos. X and XI from “More Poems”

X
The weeping Pleiads wester,
  And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
  Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
  To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
  And I lie down alone.
XI
The rainy Pleiads wester,
  Orion plunges prone;
The stroke of midnight ceases,
  And I lie down alone.
The rainy Pleiads wester
  And seek beyond the [...]

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John Keats, “On ‘The Story of Rimini’”

Who loves to peer up at the morning sun,
  With half-shut eyes and comfortable cheek,
  Let him, with this sweet tale, full often seek
For meadows where the little rivers run;
Who loves to linger with that brightest one
  Of Heaven – Hesperus – let him lowly speak
  These numbers to the night, and starlight meek,
Or moon, [...]

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Lines Written: Virginia Woolf

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jungle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
I [...]

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MONSTERS OF POETRY: William Shakespeare!

Sonnet #18
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course [...]

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MONSTERS OF POETRY: Gerard Manley Hopkins!

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; [...]

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