HOWL POEMS

The Cuckoo-clock

Wouldst thou be taught, when sleep has taken flight,
By a sure voice that can most sweetly tell,
How far off yet a glimpse of morning light,
And if to lure the truant back be well,
.....

William Wordsworth

Auguries Of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
.....

William Blake

Mary

I.

Who is she, the poor Maniac, whose wildly-fix'd eyes
Seem a heart overcharged to express?
.....

Robert Southey

Not What Was Meant

When the Academy of Arts demanded freedom
Of artistic expression from narrow-minded bureaucrats
There was a howl and a clamour in its immediate vicinity
But roaring above everything
.....

Bertolt Brecht

The Hunting Of The Snark

Dedication

Inscribed to a dear Child:
in memory of golden summer hours
.....

Lewis Carroll

The Bowl

JUST let the Owl of Evil howl;
To mourners of each rank and station, I cry,
Come, troll the Golden Bowl!
And quaff me with a deep potation.
.....

Joseph Skipsey

Wolves

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
.....

Louis Macneice

A Joyful Song Of Five

Come, let us all sing very high
And all sing very loud
And keep on singing in the street
Until there's quite a crowd;
.....

Katherine Mansfield

Ezra On The Strike

Wal, Thanksgivin' do be comin' round.
With the price of turkeys on the bound,
And coal, by gum! Thet were just found,
Is surely gettin' cheaper.
.....

Ezra Pound

The Wild Knight

A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within.
.....

G. K. Chesterton

Try To Remember Some Details

Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing
of the one you love
so that on the day of loss you'll be able to say: last seen
wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.
.....

Yehuda Amichai

Comus

A Masque Presented At Ludlow Castle, 1634, Before

The Earl Of Bridgewater, Then President Of Wales.

.....

John Milton

Luna

O France, although you sleep
We call you, we the forbidden!
The shadows have ears,
And the depths have cries.
.....

Victor Marie Hugo

Lycabas

A name of the Year. Some say the word means a march of wolves,
which wolves, running in single file, are the Months of the Year.
Others say the word means the path of the light.

.....

George Macdonald

The Shooting Of Dan Mcgrew

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
.....

Robert Service

What Makes Summer?

Winter froze both brook and well;
Fast and fast the snowflakes fell;
Children gathered round the hearth
Made a summer of their mirth;
.....

George Macdonald

The Last Suttee

Not many years ago a King died in one of the Rajpoot States.
His wives, disregarding the orders of the English against Suttee,
would have broken out of the palace had not the gates been barred.
But one of them, disguised as the King's favourite dancing-girl,
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Savitri. Part V.

As consciousness came slowly back
He recognised his loving wife--
"Who was it, Love, through regions black
Where hardly seemed a sign of life
.....

Toru Dutt

Fragment Written Shortly After The Marriage Of Miss Chaworth

Hills of Annesley, Bleak and Barren,
Where my thoughtless Childhood stray'd,
How the northern Tempests, warring,
Howl above thy tufted Shade!
.....

George Gordon Lord Byron

Just So

JUST let the Owl of Evil howl!
To mourners of each rank and station,
I cry, Come troll the Golden Bowl,
And quaff with me one deep potation!
.....

Joseph Skipsey

Under The Poplars

Like priestly imprisoned poets,
the poplars of blood have fallen asleep.
On the hills, the flocks of Bethlehem
chew arias of grass at sunset.
.....

Cesar Vallejo

Napoleon The Little

How well I knew this stealthy wolf would howl
When in the eagle talons ta'en in air!
A-glow, I snatched thee from thy prey, fowl!
I held thee, abject conqueror, just where
.....

Victor Marie Hugo

The Lee Shore

Sleet! and hail! and thunder!
And ye winds that rave,
Till the sands there under
Tinge the sullen wave --
.....

Thomas Hood

Galoots

GALOOTS, you hairy, hankering,
Snousle on the bones you eat, chew at the gristle and lick the last of it.
Grab off the bones in the paws of other galoots-hook your claws in their sleazy mouths-snap and run.
If long-necks sit on their rumps and sing wild cries to the winter moon, chasing their tails to the flickers of foolish stars ... let 'em howl.
.....

Carl Sandburg

Morning Madness

Exploring each other's
depths,
that surge of connection
which makes the world
.....

Erica Jong

Canopus

When quacks with pills political would dope us,
When politics absorbs the livelong day,
I like to think about that star Canopus,
So far, so far away.
.....

Bert Leston Taylor

The Miser

Withered and gray as winter; gnarled and old,
With bony hands he crouches by the coals;
His beggar's coat is patched and worn in holes;
Rags are his shoes: clutched in his claw-like hold
.....

Madison Julius Cawein

Sunshine

I

Flat as a drum-head stretch the haggard snows;
The mighty skies are palisades of light;
.....

Robert Service

The Tale Of The Tiger Tree

A Fantasy, dedicated to the little poet Alice Oliver
Henderson, ten years old.

The Fantasy shows how tiger-hearts are the cause of war in
.....

Vachel Lindsay

The Feast Of The Virgins

The sun sails high in his azure realms;
Beneath the arch of the breezy elms
The feast is spread by the murmuring river.
With his battle-spear and his bow and quiver,
.....

Hanford Lennox Gordon

Men

Man is a creature of a thousand whims;
The slave of hope and fear and circumstance.
Through toil and martyrdom a million years
Struggling and groping upward from the brute,
.....

Hanford Lennox Gordon

Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages

(The Dry Salvages-presumably les trois sauvages
- is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E.
coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced
to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
.....

T. S. Eliot

Right's Security

What if the wind do howl without,
And turn the creaking weather-vane;
What if the arrows of the rain
Do beat against the window-pane?
.....

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Time, A Poem

Genius of musings, who, the midnight hour
Wasting in woods or haunted forests wild,
Dost watch Orion in his arctic tower,
Thy dark eye fix'd as in some holy trance;
.....

Henry Kirk White

Hyperion: Book I

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
.....

John Keats

Western Dusk

A faun-cry romps through sparks,

In the parks cascades of light foam,

.....

Georg Trakl

Pauline Part I

To the memory of my devoted wife dead and gone yet always with me I dedicate

PAULINE

.....

Hanford Lennox Gordon

Nell Flaherty's Drake

My name it is Nell, right candid I tell,
And I live near a dell I ne'er will deny,
I had a large drake, the truth for to spake,
My grandfather left me when going to die;
.....

Anonymous

Kittens

A ray of sun strayed softly round,
For something to caress,
Until a resting place it found
Of joy and thankfulness;
.....

Robert William Service

Storm

Out of the grey northwest, where many a day gone by
Ye tugged and howled in your tempestuous grot,
And evermore the huge frost giants lie,
Your wizard guards in vigilance unforgot,
.....

Archibald Lampman

Dead March

Under the bunker, where the reek of kerosene
Prepared the marriage rite, leader and whore,
Imperfect kindling even in this wind, burn on.

.....

Weldon Kees

Hoodlums

I AM a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum, we and all of us are a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
I hate and kill better men than I am, so do you, so do all of us-maybe-maybe so.
In the ends of my fingers the itch for another man's neck, I want to see him hanging, one of dusk's cartoons against the sunset.
This is the hate my father gave me, this was in my mother's milk, this is you and me and all of us in a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
.....

Carl Sandburg

The Further Bank

I long to go over there to the further bank of the river.
Where those boats are tied to the bamboo poles in a line;
Where men cross over in their boats in the morning with
ploughs on their shoulders to till their far-away fields;
.....

Rabindranath Tagore

The Little Girl Found

All the night in woe,
Lyca's parents go:
Over vallies deep.
While the desarts weep.
.....

William Blake

Snow Storm

What a night! The wind howls, hisses, and but stops
To howl more loud, while the snow volley keeps
Incessant batter at the window pane,
Making our comfort feel as sweet again;
.....

John Clare

The Bird

Hither thou com'st: the busy wind all night
Blew through thy lodging, where thy own warm wing
Thy pillow was. Many a sullen storm
(For which coarse man seems much the fitter born)
.....

Henry Vaughan

The Voice Of Beauty Drowned

Cry from the thicket my heart's bird!
The other birds woke all around,
Rising with toot and howl they stirred
Their plumage, broke the trembling sound,
.....

Robert Graves

Night

The sun descending in the west.
The evening star does shine.
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine,
.....

William Blake

J'k. Huysmans

A flickering glimmer through a window-pane,
A dim red glare through mud bespattered glass,
Cleaving a path between blown walls of sleet
Across uneven pavements sunk in slime
.....

Amy Lowell

Botany Bay Eclogues 05 - Frederic

(Time Night. Scene the woods.)


Where shall I turn me? whither shall I bend
.....

Robert Southey