This weekend was terrible! Here are some poems.

[violsva]

Pied Beauty

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.


In Bohemia

Arthur Symons

Drawn blinds and flaring gas within,
And wine, and women, and cigars;
Without, the city’s heedless din;
Above, the white unheeding stars.

And we, alike from each remote,
The world that works, the heaven that waits,
Con our brief pleasures o’er by rote,
The favourite pastime of the Fates.

We smoke, to fancy that we dream,
And drink, a moment’s joy to prove,
And fain would love, and only seem
To love because we cannot love.

Draw back the blinds, put out the light:
'Tis morning, let the daylight come.
God! how the women’s checks are white,
And how the sunlight strikes us dumb!


From the Dark Tower

Countee Cullen

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.