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“The King sits in Dunferline toun, /Drinkin the blude-reid wine/ ‘O whaur will A get a skeely skipper/ Tae sail this new ship o mine?’
Sir Patrick Speens
“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea But sad mortality o’er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?”
Shakespeare
“Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”
Holy Sonnet 14 (Batter My Heart)
By John Donne
“As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No:”
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
By John Donne
“Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why Will man lament the state he should envy?”
On My First Son
By Ben Johnson
“Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.”
To The Virgins, to Make Much of Time
By Robert Herrick
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Love (III)
By George Herbert
“When I consider how my light is spent / Ere half my days in this dark world and wide…”
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
By John Milton
“Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime.”
To His Coy Mistress
By Andrew Marvell
"In what distant deeps or skies./ Burnt the fire of thine eyes?/ On what wings dare he aspire?/ What the hand, dare seize the fire?"
The Tyger
By William Blake
“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind / I turned to share the transport…”
Surprised by Joy
By William Wordsworth
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken…”
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
By John Keats
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Ode on a Grecian Urn
By John Keats
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--/ Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night/ And watching, with eternal lids apart,/ Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite"
Bright Star
By John Keats
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' / We are not now that strength which in old days/ Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;/ One equal temper of heroic hearts,/ Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Ulysses
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
" 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.
Dover Beach
By Matthew Arnold
" Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier, / As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole, / Vigil final for you brave boy"
Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
By Walt Whitman
"When it comes, the Landscape listens-/ Shadows- hold their breath-/ When it goes, 'tis like the Distance/ On the look of Death-
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
By Emily Dickinson
"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 Darkling Thrush
By Thomas Hardy
"I caught this morning morning's minion, king-/ dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/ Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding/ High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,/ As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. /My heart in hiding /Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!"
The Windhover
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
"The time you won your town the race/ We chaired you through the market-place;/ Man and boy stood cheering by,/ And home we brought you shoulder-high."
To an Athlete Dying Young
By A.E. Housman
"We sat together on one summer's end,/ That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, / And you and I, and talked of poetry."
Adam’s Curse
By W.B. Yeats
" I have met them at close of day/ Coming with vivid faces/ From counter or desk among grey/eighteenth century houses./ I have passed with a nod of the head/ Or polite meaningless words,/ And thought before I had done/ Of a mocking tale or a gibe"
Easter 1916
By W.B. Yeats
"Whose woods these are I think I know./ His house is in the village though;/ He will not see me stopping here/ to watch his woods fill up with snow."
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost