Dave Shaw: "A Bluebell Forest Walk"

 

Poem on Film format

John Bunyan, R. Vaughan Williams & The Holy Childhood Schola Cantorum

"The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan (gutenberg.org)

Daniel Nepveux: "Winter Rainbows"

 

Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ?

Thou are more lovely and more temperate ,

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May ,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date :

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines ,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd :

And every fair from fair sometime declines ,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade ,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest ;

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade

When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see

   So long lives this, and this give life to thee.

Sonnet LXXXIII

 I never saw that you did painting need,

And therefore to your fair no painting set;

I found (or thought I found) you did exceed

The barren tender of a poet's debt;

And therefore have I slept in your report,

That you yourself, being extant, well might show

How far a modern quill doth come to short, 

Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.

This silence for my sin you did impute,

Which shall be most my glory, being dumb;

For I impair not beauty, being mute,

When others would give life, and bring a tomb.

     

        There lives more life in one of you fair eyes

        Than both your poets can in praise devise.

The Portable SHAKESPEARE

William Wadsworth: "Upon Westminster Bridge"

                                                    Sept. 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky,

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did the sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

 

Classic fM " One Hundred Favourite Poems"

Hodder & Stoughton, 2000

Emily Dickinson: "I Died for Beauty"

I died for Beauty, but was scarce

adjusted in the tomb,

when one who died for Truth was lain

in an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

"For Beauty", I replied.

"And I for Truth, - the two are one;

we brethren are", he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

we talked between the rooms,

until the moss has reached our lips,

and covered up our names.

E.B. : "A Threnodia"

A stone more than the Ebenezer famed:

Stone, splendent diamond, right orient named;

A cordial stone, that often cheered hearts

With pleasant wit, with Gospel reach imparts;

Whetstone, that edgified the obtusest mind--

Loadstone, that drew the iron heart unkind--

A ponderous stone, that would the bottom sound

Of scripture depths, and bring out arcans found;

A stone for kingly David's use so fit

As would not fail Goliath's front to hit;

A stone, an antidote, that brake the course

Of gangrene error by convincing force;

A stone acute, fit to divide and square;

A squared stone became Christ's building rare.

[... In 1663 Samuel Stone, Hooker's colleague in the Hartford pulpit, died, much loved and lamented. One "E.B." wrote a threnody upon "our church's second dark eclipse" which was later printed in a history of the colonies. "E.B." was probably Edward Bulkeley, son of Peter of Concord, but this is not certain. Whoever wrote it took a leaping the metaphysical wilderness, and wrought upon the name "Stone" as elaborate a conceit as any court wit of the century ever devised.]

THE AMERICAN PURITANS - Their Prose and Poetry

Edited by Perry Miller

Doubleday Anchor Publishers, 1956