Music of the Rhymes

Sara Teasdale

…From the wisdom of many life-times

I hear them cry:”Forever

Seek for Beauty, she only

Fights with man against Death!”

Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945)

Thou sombre lady of down—bended head,
And weary lashes drooping to the cheek,
With sweet sad fold of lips uncomforted,
And listless hands more tired with strife than meek;
Turn here thy soft brown feet, and to my heart,
Unmatched to Summer’s golden minstrelsy,
Or Spring’s shrill pipe of joy, sing once again
Sad songs, and I to thee
Well tuned, will answer that according part
That jarred with those young seasons’ gladder strain.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star,

O night desirous as the nights of youth!

Why should my heart within thy spell, forsooth,

Now beat, as the bride’s finger-pulses are

Quickened within the girdling golden bar?

What wings are these that fan my pillow smooth?

And why does Sleep, waved back by Joy and Ruth,

Tread softly round and gaze at me from far?…

W.H. Auden

Base words are uttered only by the base

And can for such at once be understood,

But noble platitudes:-ah, there’s a case

Where the most careful scrutiny is needed

To tell a voice that’s genuinely good

From one that’s base but merely has succeeded.

William Blake

…Then every man of every clime,

That prays in his distress,

Prays to the human form divine

Love Mercy Pity Peace….

Alfred Austin

…They do not love who give the body and keep

The heart ungiven; nor they who yield the soul,

And guard the body. Love doth give the whole;

Its range being high as heaven, as ocean deep,

Wide as the realms of air or planet’s curving sweep.

Walt Whitman

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road.

William Ernest Henley

…In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed…

Lord Byron

Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh

Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky;

Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod,

With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod;

With those who, scattered far, perchance deplore,

Like me, the happy scenes they knew before:

O, as I trace again thy winding hill,

Mine eyes admire, my heart adores thee still…

William Blake

I fear’d the fury of my wind

Would blight all blossoms fair and true;

And my sun it shin’d and shin’d,

And my wind it never blew…

Wallace Stevens

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.

It is what it is as I am what I am:

And in perceiving this I best perceive myself…

…That night is only the background of our selves,

Supremely true each to its separate self,

In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

William Shakespeare

…By chance or natures changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall death brag thou wandrest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
Which hold my life in their dead doing might
Shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
Lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
And reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
Written with teares in harts close bleeding book…

Edgar A. Guest

…When you get to know a fellow, know his every mood and whim,
You begin to find the texture of the splendid
side of him;
You begin to understand him, and you cease to scoff and sneer,
For with understanding always prejudices disappear.
You begin to find his virtues and his faults you
cease to tell,
For you seldom hate a fellow when you know
him very well…

A.S.Pushkin

Heedless of the proud world’s enjoyment,

I prize the attention of my friends,

and only wish that my employment

could have been turned to worthier ends —

worthier of you in the perfection

your soul displays, in holy dreams,

in simple but sublime reflection,

in limpid verse that lives and gleams….

New Year comes, we wait for it —
It’s magic everywhere.
And everybody wish repeats:
To have great health and care.
Let all the dreams come true so soon,
Let life be easy, perfect!
And Let the table become full
Of friends and meal, and chocolate.

Robert Louis Stevenson

…To make this earth, our hermitage,

A cheerful and a changeful page,

God’s bright and intricate device

Of days and seasons doth suffice.

Alexandr Pushkin

The wondrous moment of our meeting…

I well remember you appear

Before me like a vision fleeting,

A beauty’s angel pure and clear…

Edward Allan Poe

Romance, who loves to nod and sing,

With drowsy head and folded wing,

Among the green leaves as they shake

Far down within some shadowy lake,

To me a painted paroquet

Hath been – a most familiar bird –

Taught me my alphabet to say –

To lisp my very earliest word

While in the wild wood I did lie,

A child – with a most knowing eye…

Charles Baudelaire

…Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;

The violin quivers like a tormented heart;

Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!

The sky is sad and beautiful like an immense altar.

Osip Mandelstam

More sluggish the snowy hive,
clearer the window’s crystal,
on a chair, a turquoise veil,
thrown there, carelessly, lies.

A tissue, self-intoxicated,
as if it never felt winter’s
touch, experiencing summer’s,
by its own delicacy, caressed:

and, if in icy diamonds
frost is eternally streaming,
here — it’s dragonflies flickering,
blue-eyed, living, and gone.
(A. S. Kline, translation)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892—1950)

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him..

Taras Shevchenko

Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

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.

Evgeniy Evtushenko

…Enlightenment is the child of peace and calm.

So never mind if we don’t rage and riot.

We’d better shuffle off all wrangles and keep

quiet in order that we see new foliage come…

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without opress of Toll—
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.

Emily Jane Brontë

…Reason, indeed, may oft complain

For Nature’s sad reality,

And tell the suffering heart how vain

Its cherished dreams must always be;

And Truth may rudely trample down

The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:

But thou art ever there, to bring

The hovering vision back, and breathe

New glories o’er the blighted spring,

And call a lovelier Life from Death….

William Blake

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:

The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark

Deep-founded habitation.

Shake not thy roofs,

Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.’

He hears me not, but o’er the yawning deep

Rides heavy; his storms are unchain’d, sheathèdIn ribbèd steel;

I dare not lift mine eyes,

For he hath rear’d his sceptre o’er the world.

Emily Dickinson

To venerate the simple days
Which lead the seasons by,
Needs but to remember
That from you or I,
They may take the trifle
Termed mortality!

Rudyard Kipling

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And-which is more-you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

Walt Whitman

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Fire and Ice (R. Frost)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.⠀

Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

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.

December is the best of all,
Snowflakes dance, snowflakes fall.
People see the New Year in,
When December ends, it will begin.

Rudyard Kipling

If You can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when

all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.

Alexandr Pushkin

Storm has set the heavens scowling,

Whirling gusty blizzards wild,

Now they are like beasts a-growling,

Now a-wailing like a child;

Now along the brittle thatches

They will scud with rustling sound,

Now against the window latches

Like belated wanderers pound…

Rudyard Kipling

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And

stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.

Mikhail Lermontov

Clouds in the sky, you are ceaselessly wandering,

As pearly chains in the azure steppes glimmering,

Exiled as I have been, constantly hurrying

From native North into South you are quickening.

Lina Kostenko Who – with fidelity in love. Who – with eternal aspirations. Who – with sincerity to work. Who – with generosity to care. Who – the song, or hope, Or with poetry, or dreams. Man allegedly does not fly … A wing has. A wing has! Translated by John Weir, Toronto	Mom is such a special word The loveliest I’ve ever heard These words to you, above all the rest, Mom, you’re so special, You are simply the best!	Robert Lee Frost …If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And-which is more-you’ll be a Man, my son!
Robert Frost Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow How beautiful is the rain! After the dust and heat, In the broad and fiery street, In the narrow lane, How beautiful is the rain!…	Oscar Wilde Dear Heart, I think the young impassioned priest When first he takes from out the hidden shrine His god imprisoned in the Eucharist, And eats the bread, and drinks the dreadful wine,
Percy Bysshe Shelley Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?	Anna Akhmatova I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries…	William Shakespeare Blow, blow, thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude.