Greater Love

Greater Love

Red lips are not so red
   As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
   When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude
   Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce Love they bear
   Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft, --
   Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, --
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear
   Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot,
   Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
   Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

                                                                                                            -Wilfred Owen

Rinita

The Sick Rose

THE SICK ROSE O rose, thou art sick!     The invisible worm, That flies in the night,     In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed     Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love     Does thy life destroy.                                                    -William Blake Rinita

Favourite Poem

Childless Woman

The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.
My land

This ivory

Ungodly as a child's shriek.
Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
Loyal to my image,

Uttering nothing but blood---
Taste it, dark red!
And my forest

My funeral,
And this hill and this
Gleaming with the mouths of corpses.

ombscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself,
Myself the rose you acheive---
This body,
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.
My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself,
Myself the rose you acheive---
This body,
This ivory
Ungodly as a child's shriek.
Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
Loyal to my image,
Uttering nothing but blood---
Taste it, dark red!
And my forest
My funeral,
And this hill and this
Gleaming with the mouths of corpses

                                             -Sylvia Plath

Rinita

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

-Walt Whitman

My Heart Leaps Up

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

- William Wordsworth

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (excerpt), T.S.Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (excerpt), T.S.Eliot (1917)

Let us go then. you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon the table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room, the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrors, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands.
That lived and dropped a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin

This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin (1974)

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They will you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.


But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-fashion styles hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-sterm
And half at one another's throats.


Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.