PORTRAIT POEMS

Studio Composition

Cup of Words

Crystal sphere sitting
Before child like statue
.....

Joseph Mayo Wristen

Any Wife To Any Husband

I

My love, this is the bitterest, that thou
Who art all truth and who dost love me now
.....

Robert Browning

Portrait By A Neighbor

Before she has her floor swept
Or her dishes done,
Any day you'll find her
A-sunning in the sun!
.....

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Temple Of Zhuge Liang

Zhu-ge's great name
hangs over the whole world;
the revered statesman's portrait
awes with its sublimity.
.....

Du Fu

The Message

To you, my comrades, whether far or near,
I send this message. Let our past revive;
Come, sound reveille to our hearts once more.
Expecting, I shall wait till at my door
.....

Elizabeth Stoddard

Tamerlane - Early Version

I.

I have sent for thee, holy friar;1
But 'twas not with the drunken hope,
.....

Edgar Allan Poe

Heliograph

(Self-Portrait) Omens and Astrology. A desert flat and undisturbed, stupid and forlorn. Sunless. a caravan of failures. Pons Asinorum and the Feast of the Ass and revolt against standardized American childhood.
War and Violence.
Catapults and Torches and the first stray thrusts of Sun into the Soul. Bombardments and Bordels. Heraldry and High Walls. Too rigid to crumble but not too strong to fracture.

.....

Harry Crosby

A Portrait

Because my love is quick to come and go-
A little here, and then a little there-
What use are any words of mine to swear
My heart is stubborn, and my spirit slow
.....

Dorothy Parker

On The Portrait Of Two Beautiful Young People

A Brother and Sister

O I admire and sorrow! The heart's eye grieves
Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years.
.....

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Premiers Amours.

Old Loves and old dreams,--
"Requiescant in pace."
How strange now it seems,--
"Old" Loves and "old" dreams!
.....

Henry Austin Dobson

The Municipal Gallery Revisited

I

Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
.....

William Butler Yeats

Tamerlane

Kind solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme-
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
.....

Edgar Allan Poe

Formerly A Slave

An idealized Portrait, by E. Vedder, in the Spring
Exhibition of the National Academy, 1865


.....

Herman Melville

Compact Dusk

Here at the height of the day night change
The color of the sky is uncertain,
The sky depending in which direction
One's eye strains, each of its swatches a strange
.....

Bill Knott

Looking At A Portrait

O why are there eyes like these,
That sparkle and dapple and tease,
So wide with the morning, so deep with the night,
Dancing and gleaming in passioned delight?
.....

Joseph Seamon Cotter

The Black Cottage

We chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass,
.....

Robert Frost

On Board Ship

It's like him, of course,
this little pencil portrait.
Hurriedly sketched, on the ship's deck,
the afternoon magical,
.....

Constantine P. Cavafy

A Portrait

LIKE the sway of the silver birch in the breeze of dawn
Is her dainty way;
Like the gray of a twilight sky or a starlit lawn
Are her eyes of gray;
.....

Edith Nesbit

Portrait Of A Lady

Thou hast committed-
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.
The Jew of Malta.
.....

T. S. Eliot

Portrait

She has no need to fear the fall
Of harvest from the laddered reach
Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing
From the steep beach.
.....

Louise Bogan

Portrait

Painter, would you make my picture?
Just forget the moral stricture.
Let me sit
With my belly to the table,
.....

Robert Service

The Alcázar

The General now lives in town;
He's eighty odd, they say;
You'll see him strolling up and down
The Prada any day.
.....

Robert Service

Portrait

(For S. A.)TO write one book in five years
or five books in one year,
to be the painter and the thing painted,
... where are we, bo?
.....

Carl Sandburg

A Portrait

Thoughtful in youth, but not austere in age;
Calm, but not cold, and cheerful though a sage;
Too true to flatter and too kind to sneer,
And only just when seemingly severe;
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Cesar Borgia: Portrait En Pied

Sur fond sombre noyant un riche vestibule
Où le buste d'Horace et celui de Tibulle
Lointain et de profil rêvent en marbre blanc,
La main gauche au poignard et la main droite au flanc,
.....

Paul Verlaine

The Portrait In The Rock

Oh yes I knew him, I spent years with him,
with his golden and stony substance,
he was a man who was tired -
in Paraguay he left his father and mother,
.....

Pablo Neruda

Everyday Characters V - Portrait Of A Lady

IN THE EXHIBITION OP THE ROYAL
ACADEMY


.....

Winthrop Mackworth Praed

Extraits

The Man Closing Up,' from Night Light' (1967),

would make his bed,
If he could sleep on it.
.....

Donald Justice

The House Of Dust: Part 04: 03: Palimpsest: A Deceitful Portrait

Well, as you say, we live for small horizons:
We move in crowds, we flow and talk together,
Seeing so many eyes and hands and faces,
So many mouths, and all with secret meanings,—
.....

Conrad Potter Aiken

Lara

LARA. [1]

CANTO THE FIRST.

.....

George Gordon Byron

Don Juan: Canto The Fourteenth

If from great nature's or our own abyss
Of thought we could but snatch a certainty,
Perhaps mankind might find the path they miss--
But then 'twould spoil much good philosophy.
.....

George Gordon Byron

Two Portraits

You say, as one who shapes a life,
That you will never be a wife,

And, laughing lightly, ask my aid
.....

Henry Timrod

On Seeing A Portrait Of Sir Robert Walpole

Such were the lively eyes and rosy hue
Of Robin's face, when Robin first I knew;
The gay companion and the fav'rite guest;
Lov'd without awe, and without views caress'd;
.....

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The Cloud Messenger - Part 04

The slender young woman who is there would be the premier creation by the
Creator in the sphere of women, with fine teeth, lips like a ripe bimba fruit, a
slim waist, eyes like a startled gazelleâ??s, a deep navel, a gait slow on account
of the weight of her hips, and who is somewhat bowed down by her breasts.
.....

Kalidasa

Experience

--A COSTLY good ; that none e'er bought or sold
For gem, or pearl, or miser's store, twice told :
Save certain watery pearls, possessed by all,
Which, one by one, may buy it as they fall.
.....

Jane Taylor

Heroic Stanzas On The Death Of Oliver Cromwell, Written After His Funeral.

And now 'tis time; for their officious haste,
Who would before have borne him to the sky,
Like eager Romans, ere all rites were past,
Did let too soon the sacred eagle[1] fly.
.....

John Dryden

The House Of Dust - Part Iii - Complete

I

As evening falls,
And the yellow lights leap one by one
.....

Conrad Potter Aiken

The House Of Dust: Part 03: 02: The Screen Maiden

You read-what is it, then that you are reading?
What music moves so silently in your mind?
Your bright hand turns the page.
I watch you from my window, unsuspected:
.....

Conrad Aiken

Un Fantà´me (a Phantom)

I Les Ténèbres

Dans les caveaux d'insondable tristesse
Où le Destin m'a déjà relégué;
.....

Charles Baudelaire

The Spagnoletto

DRAMATIS PERSONAE.
DON JOHN of AUSTRIA.
JOSEF RIBERA, the Spagnoletto.
LORENZO, noble young Italian artist, pupil of Ribera.
.....

Emma Lazarus

You Know That Portrait In The Moon

504

You know that Portrait in the Moon-
So tell me who 'tis like-
.....

Emily Dickinson

The Moon Is A Painter

He coveted her portrait.
He toiled as she grew gay.
She loved to see him labor
In that devoted way.
.....

Vachel Lindsay

Portrait And Reality

If on the closed curtain of my sight
My fancy paints thy portrait far away,
I see thee still the same, by night or day;
Crossing the crowded street, or moving bright
.....

Henry Van Dyke

On A Portrait Of Wordsworth

WORDSWORTH upon Helvellyn ! Let the cloud
Ebb audibly along the mountain-wind,
Then break against the rock, and show behind
The lowland valleys floating up to crowd
.....

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The House Of Dust: Part 03: 02: The Screen Maiden

You read—what is it, then that you are reading?
What music moves so silently in your mind?
Your bright hand turns the page.
I watch you from my window, unsuspected:
.....

Conrad Potter Aiken

The Portrait

In some quaint Nurnberg
maler-atelier

Uprummaged. When and where was never clear
.....

Madison Julius Cawein

To The Portrait Of

Well, Miss, I wonder where you live,
I wonder what�s your name,
I wonder how you came to be
In such a stylish frame;
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

To A Portrait Of

IN THE ATHENIEUM GALLERY

IT may be so,--perhaps thou hast
A warm and loving heart;
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

You Know That Portrait In The Moon

504

You know that Portrait in the Moon—
So tell me who 'tis like—
.....

Emily Dickinson

To The Author's Portrait

Go, faithful Portrait! and where long hath knelt
Margaret, the Saintly Foundress, take thy place;
And, if Time spare the colours for the grace
Which to the work surpassing skill hath dealt,
.....

William Wordsworth