Penguin's Poems for Life

by Laura Barber

The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,

  And, staring out at us with all their blue,

  As half perplexed between the angelhood

  He had been away to visit in his sleep,

  And our most mortal presence, – gradually

  He saw his mother’s face, accepting it

  In change for heaven itself, with such a smile

  As might have well been learnt there, – never moved,

  But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,

  So happy (half with her and half with heaven)

  He could not have the trouble to be stirred,

  But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:

  As red and still indeed as any rose,

  That blows in all the silence of its leaves,

  Content in blowing to fulfil its life.

  She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)

  In that extremity of love, ’twill pass

  For agony or rapture, seeing that love

  Includes the whole of nature, rounding it

  To love… no more, – since more can never be

  Than just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,

  And drowning in the transport of the sight,

  Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,

  One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled

  She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,

  And drawing from his countenance to hers

  A fainter red, as if she watched a flame

  And stood in it a-glow. ‘How beautiful,’

  Said she.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  Spring

  Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –

  When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

  Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

  Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

  The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

  The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

  The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

  With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

  What is all this juice and all this joy?

  A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

  In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,

  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

  Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

  Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the

  winning.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  The Angel that presided o’er my birth

  Said ‘Little creature, form’d of joy and mirth,

  Go, love without the help of anything on earth.’

  HENRY VAUGHAN

  The Retreat

  Happy those early days, when I

  Shined in my angel infancy!

  Before I understood this place

  Appointed for my second race,

  Or taught my soul to fancy aught

  But a white, celestial thought,

  When yet I had not walked above

  A mile, or two, from my first love,

  And looking back (at that short space)

  Could see a glimpse of his bright face;

  When on some gilded cloud, or flow’r

  My gazing soul would dwell an hour,

  And in those weaker glories spy

  Some shadows of eternity;

  Before I taught my tongue to wound

  My conscience with a sinful sound,

  Or had the black art to dispense

  A sev’ral sin to ev’ry sense,

  But felt through all this fleshly dress

  Bright shoots of everlastingness.

  Oh how I long to travel back

  And tread again that ancient track!

  That I might once more reach that plain

  Where first I left my glorious train,

  From whence th’ enlightened spirit sees

  That shady city of palm trees;

  But (ah!) my soul with too much stay

  Is drunk, and staggers in the way.

  Some men a forward motion love,

  But I by backward steps would move,

  And when this dust falls to the urn

  In that state I came return.

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  Ode (Intimations of Immortality from

  Recollections of Early Childhood)

  Paulò majora canamus

  There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

  The earth, and every common sight,

  To me did seem

  Apparelled in celestial light,

  The glory and the freshness of a dream.

  It is not now as it hath been of yore; –

  Turn wheresoe’er I may,

  By night or day,

  The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

  The Rainbow comes and goes,

  And lovely is the Rose,

  The Moon doth with delight

  Look round her when the heavens are bare;

  Waters on a starry night

  Are beautiful and fair;

  The sunshine is a glorious birth;

  But yet I know, where’er I go,

  That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

  Now, while the Birds thus sing a joyous song,

  And while the young Lambs bound

  As to the tabor’s sound,

  To me alone there came a thought of grief:

  A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

  And I again am strong.

  The Cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,

  No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

  I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,

  The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

  And all the earth is gay,

  Land and sea

  Give themselves up to jollity,

  And with the heart of May

  Doth every Beast keep holiday,

  Thou Child of Joy,

  Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy

  Shepherd Boy!

  Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call

  Ye to each other make; I see

  The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

  My heart is at your festival,

  My head hath its coronal,

  The fullness of your bliss, I feel – I feel it all.

  Oh evil day! if I were sullen

  While the Earth herself is adorning,

  This sweet May-morning,

  And the Children are culling,

  On every side,

  In a thousand valleys far and wide,

  Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,

  And the Babe leaps up on his mother’s arm: –

  I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

  – But there’s a Tree, of many one,

  A single Field which I have looked upon,

  Both of them speak of something that is gone:

  The Pansy at my feet

  Doth the same tale repeat:

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

  The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

  Hath had elsewhere its setting,

  And cometh from afar:

  Not in entire forgetfulness,

  And not in utter nakedness,

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God, who is our home:

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close

  Upon the growing Boy,

  But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

  He sees it in his joy;

  The Youth, who daily farther from the East

  Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

  And by the vision splendid

  Is on his way
attended;

  At length the Man perceives it die away,

  And fade into the light of common day.

  Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

  Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

  And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,

  And no unworthy aim,

  The homely Nurse doth all she can

  To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,

  Forget the glories he hath known,

  And that imperial palace whence he came.

  Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

  A four year’s Darling of a pigmy size!

  See, where mid work of his own hand he lies,

  Fretted by sallies of his Mother’s kisses,

  With light upon him from his Father’s eyes!

  See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

  Some fragment from his dream of human life,

  Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;

  A wedding or a festival,

  A mourning or a funeral;

  And this hath now his heart,

  And unto this he frames his song:

  Then will he fit his tongue

  To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

  But it will not be long

  Ere this be thrown aside,

  And with new joy and pride

  The little Actor cons another part,

  Filling from time to time his ‘humorous stage’

  With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

  That Life brings with her in her Equipage;

  As if his whole vocation

  Were endless imitation.

  Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

  Thy Soul’s immensity;

  Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

  Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

  That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

  Haunted for ever by the eternal mind, –

  Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

  On whom those truths do rest,

  Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

  In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

  Thou, over whom thy Immortality

  Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,

  A Presence which is not to be put by;

  To whom the grave

  Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight

  Of day or the warm light,

  A place of thought where we in waiting lie;

  Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

  Of untamed pleasures, on thy Being’s height,

  Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

  The Years to bring the inevitable yoke,

  Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

  Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

  And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

  Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

  O joy! that in our embers

  Is something that doth live,

  That nature yet remembers

  What was so fugitive!

  The thought of our past years in me doth breed

  Perpetual benedictions: not indeed

  For that which is most worthy to be blest;

  Delight and liberty, the simple creed

  Of Childhood, whether fluttering or at rest,

  With new-born hope for ever in his breast: –

  Not for these I raise

  The song of thanks and praise;

  But for those obstinate questionings

  Of sense and outward things,

  Fallings from us, vanishings;

  Blank misgivings of a Creature

  Moving about in worlds not realized,

  High instincts, before which our mortal Nature

  Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprized:

  But for those first affections,

  Those shadowy recollections,

  Which, be they what they may,

  Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

  Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

  Uphold us, cherish us, and make

  Our noisy years seem moments in the being

  Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

  To perish never;

  Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

  Nor Man nor Boy,

  Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

  Can utterly abolish or destroy!

  Hence, in a season of calm weather,

  Though inland far we be,

  Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

  Which brought us hither,

  Can in a moment travel thither,

  And see the Children sport upon the shore,

  And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

  Then, sing ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

  And let the young Lambs bound

  As to the tabor’s sound!

  We in thought will join your throng,

  Ye that pipe and ye that play,

  Ye that through your hearts to day

  Feel the gladness of the May!

  What though the radiance which was once so bright

  Be now for ever taken from my sight,

  Though nothing can bring back the hour

  Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

  We will grieve not, rather find

  Strength in what remains behind,

  In the primal sympathy

  Which having been must ever be,

  In the soothing thoughts that spring

  Out of human suffering,

  In the faith that looks through death,

  In years that bring the philosophic mind.

  And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

  Think not of any severing of our loves!

  Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

  I only have relinquished one delight

  To live beneath your more habitual sway.

  I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

  Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

  The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

  Is lovely yet;

  The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

  Do take a sober colouring from an eye

  That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;

  Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

  Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

  To me the meanest flower that blows can give

  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

  R. S. THOMAS

  Children’s Song

  We live in our own world.

  A world that is too small

  For you to stoop and enter

  Even on hands and knees,

  The adult subterfuge.

  And though you probe and pry

  With analytic eye,

  And eavesdrop all our talk

  With an amused look,

  You cannot find the centre

  Where we dance, where we play,

  Where life is still asleep

  Under the closed flower,

  Under the smooth shell

  Of eggs in the cupped nest

  That mock the faded blue

  Of your remoter heaven.

  TED HUGHES

  Full Moon and Little Frieda

  A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark

  and the clank of a bucket –

  And you listening.

  A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.

  A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror

  To tempt a first star to a tremor.

  Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the

  hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –

  A dark river of blood, many boulders,

  Balancing unspilled milk.

 
‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

  The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing

  amazed at a work

  That points at him amazed

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Escape at Bedtime

  The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out

  Through the blinds and the windows and bars;

  And high overhead and all moving about,

  There were thousands of millions of stars.

  There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,

  Nor of people in church or the Park,

  As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,

  And that glittered and winked in the dark.

  The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,

  And the star of the sailor, and Mars,

  These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall

  Would be half full of water and stars.

  They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,

  And they soon had me packed into bed;

  But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,

  And the stars going round in my head.

  EUGENE FIELD

  Dutch Lullaby

  Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night

  Sailed off in a wooden shoe, –

  Sailed on a river of misty light

  Into a sea of dew.

  ‘Where are you going, and what do you wish?’

  The old moon asked the three.

  ‘We have come to fish for the herring-fish

  That live in this beautiful sea;

  Nets of silver and gold have we,’

  Said Wynken,

  Blynken,

  And Nod.

  The old moon laughed and sung a song,

  As they rocked in the wooden shoe;

  And the wind that sped them all night long

  Ruffled the waves of dew;

  The little stars were the herring-fish

  That lived in the beautiful sea.

  ‘Now cast your nets wherever you wish,

  But never afeard are we!’

  So cried the stars to the fishermen three,

  Wynken,

  Blynken,

  And Nod.

  All night long their nets they threw

  For the fish in the twinkling foam,

  Then down from the sky came the wooden shoe,