诗 · CONTENT CATEGORY
World poetry
Read poetry across languages and traditions, with authors, source editions and reviewed translations kept distinct.
136 reviewed public itemsValedictory Sonnet to the River Duddon
Thinking of the river as something passed away, the speaker corrects himself: the stream still glides and will glide for ever while men must vanish, and he settles for the hope that what our hands leave behind can serve the future and that love, hope and faith make us greater than we know.
When we Two parted
Recalling a parting marked by silence, tears and a cold kiss, the speaker links that chill to present shame at the other's broken vows and gossiped name, and imagines that any future meeting would repeat the same silence and tears.
For Music
The speaker tells the addressee that their voice works like music over water, holding the waves still and the winds dreaming, so that the listening spirit bows in adoration while the midnight moon lies on a gently breathing sea.
We’ll go no more a-roving
The speakers still feel love and brightness, yet accept that the heart, sword, and soul must rest and that their nightly roaming must pause.
She walks in Beauty
Light and darkness balance in a woman’s appearance before the poem turns inward to serenity, goodness, and an innocent heart.
Hymn of Pan
Pan claims that his piping silenced woods, waters, insects and nymphs and drew even the gods' envy, then reports changing his tune to the pursuit of a maiden who became a reed, a loss at which all his hearers wept.
The Indian Serenade
Waking from dreams of the beloved in the first sleep of night, the speaker is carried by some spirit to her chamber window, and after listening to the faint airs and the nightingale he collapses, begging to be lifted, kissed and pressed to her heart.
Night
The speaker urges Night, personified as a star-inwrought spirit who weaves dreams by day, to cross the western wave and blind the eyes of Day, recalls sighing for her from dawn to dusk and refusing the offers of her brother Death and her child Sleep, and asks only that she come soon.
From the Arabic
The speaker's spirit, sitting in the light of the beloved's looks, is left behind when a swift horse carries the beloved away, and he sends his heart—faster than storm or steed—to keep company through battle, darkness and need without claiming one smile in return.
Lines
Starting from a shattered lamp, a scattered cloud and a broken lute, the poem argues that when hearts have once mingled love leaves first and the weaker one is left to endure alone, and asks why Love makes the frailest thing its cradle, home and bier.
Remorse
At nightfall a voice commands departure: duty and dereliction guide the addressee back to solitude, then to a sad, silent home of bitter tears and ghostlike shades. The poem says the soul or the world must fade before the addressee can meet peace. Cloud shadows, winds, ocean and whatever moves, toils or grieves all have their appointed sleep, and the addressee shall rest in the grave; yet until the phantoms that house, heath and garden once made dear have fled, remembrance, repentance and deep musings remain bound to the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.
Music, when Soft Voices die
Music, scent, and rose leaves outlast their immediate forms; the final address imagines love resting upon the thoughts left by someone who is gone.
To Autumn
Autumn appears through ripening, harvest, and approaching dusk, heard on its own terms rather than measured against spring.
Ode on Melancholy
The poem forbids the poisons and death-emblems usually sought in grief, redirects the sudden melancholy fit toward a morning rose, a rainbow on the wave, peonies and a mistress's anger, and locates melancholy's shrine inside the temple of delight itself.
Fragment of an Ode to Maia
The speaker asks in what manner he may sing to Maia, wishes for the old vigour of poets who died content leaving great verse to a small circle, and hopes his own song may die away unheard except by a primrose and a few ears.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth
Addressing dead poets who left their souls on earth, the poem imagines their other souls conversing among Elysian lawns, rose-scented daisies and a nightingale that sings divine truth, then turns back to the earthly works that still teach the living about sorrow, passion, glory and shame.
Stanzas
In a December night the tree and the brook are called happy because they cannot remember their green summer, while human beings, who writhe at past joy, must know and feel the change with nothing to heal it—a state the poem says was never said in rhyme.
On first looking into Chapman’s Homer
The speaker likens years of reading to travel through golden realms and western islands, says he never breathed the pure air of Homer's domain until he heard Chapman, and compares the moment to an astronomer sighting a new planet and to explorers staring silently at an unknown ocean.
When I have Fears that I may cease to be
The speaker sets out three fears—of dying before his pen empties his teeming brain, before he can trace the cloudy symbols of high romance, and before he can look again on a beloved creature of an hour—and ends standing alone on the shore of the world while love and fame sink to nothing.
To Helen
Classical images of ships, Greece, Rome, and Psyche make beauty a guiding presence that leads a weary wanderer home.
PASSIONS are liken’d best to floods and streams
A six-line epigram likens passions to water, holding that shallow streams murmur while deep ones are silent, and concludes that those rich in words are poor in what makes a lover.
WRONG not, sweet empress of my heart
The speaker asks his lady not to assume that a lover who sues for no compassion feels no pain, argues that silence in love shows more woe than witty speech, and returns to the opening plea.
His Pilgrimage
The speaker outfits himself with emblematic pilgrim's gear—scallop-shell, staff, scrip, bottle and gown—and imagines his soul travelling over silver mountains to nectar fountains where its thirst ends.
The Conclusion
Eight lines describe Time as a trustee that takes youth and joy and repays only earth and dust, then turn in the closing couplet to the speaker's trust that God will raise him from that dust.