BookFeed Ελληνικά If Poetry stayed with you, these share its feel: wonder, morality and melancholy. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.
About Poetry · John Keats
A. E. Housman, 1896
Also melancholy and morality. Sixty-three clipped, singing poems about cherry blossom, lost hometowns, soldiers and the brevity of youth.
Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again. Emily Dickinson, 1890
Also wonder and nature. Short poems that fit in a single scroll and still leave you rearranging your view of hope, fear, nature and death. Read them slowly, once aloud, and they get stranger.
Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,And sweetest in the gale is heard;And sore must be the stormThat could abash the little birdThat kept so many warm.I ‘ve heard it in the chillest land,And on the strangest sea;Yet, never, in extremity,It asked a crumb of me. Henry van Dyke Jr., 1894
Also nature and wonder. A minister who loved birds, ships and the sea writes plain, musical poems about time, strangers and the guest-right of God — quieter and stranger than its era suggests.
We men hat go down for a livin’ in ships to the sea—We love it a different way from you poets that ’bide on the land.We are fond of it, sure! But, you take it as comin’ from me,There’s a fear and a hate in our love that a landsman can’t understand.Oh, who could help likin’ the salty smell, and the blueOf the waves that are lazily breathin’ as if they dreamed in the sun?She’s a Sleepin’ Beauty, the sea—but you can’t tell what she’ll do;And the seamen never trust her—they know too well what she’s done! Rudyard Kipling, 1894
Also nature and wonder. A boy raised by wolves, a mongoose at war with cobras, a seal hunting for a beach with no men — India's animals, and the laws they keep.
He set his teeth and said nothing, but went with the shouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone reservoirs that were half full of rainwater. There was a ruined summerhouse of white marble in the center of the terrace, built for queens dead a hundred years ago. The domed roof had half fallen in and blocked up the underground passage from the palace by which the queens used to enter; but the walls were made of screens of marble tracery—beautiful, milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it shone through the openwork, casting shadows on the ground like black-velvet embroidery. Kahlil Gibran, 1918
Also melancholy and wonder. A madman strips off his masks and speaks in parables about friendship, defeat, grief, and the selves we hide.
Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,In your eyes I have readThat to be enthroned is to be enslaved,And to be understood is to be leveled down,And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullnessAnd like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed.Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion,You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences,And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings,And urging of seas,And of mountains that burn in the night,And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul. Natsume Sōseki, 1906
Also wonder and art. A painter escapes to a mountain inn to see the world as art, and finds a village, a strange woman, and a war that will not stay outside the frame.
My old host volunteered in his nephew’s place to let me understand that the youth was destined to leave for Manchuria in a day or two. I had thought that there was only feathered songsters to listen to, only flowers to see fall, only hot spring to warble forth in this dreamy land of poetry in a mountain bosom, in peaceful Spring. Alas, the living world had come crossing the sea and mountain and oozing into this home of a forgotten tribe, and the time may come when a small fraction of blood making a crimson sea of bleak Manchuria may flow from this youth’s arteries. This very youth is sitting next to an artist who sees nothing worth seeing in human life but dreaming. He sits so near that the artist may hear his heart throb. J. P. Jacobsen, 1880
Also melancholy and art. A young Dane tries to live without God, without illusions, and without turning his own life into literature—and keeps failing in ways that feel embarrassingly familiar.
Shel Silverstein, 1974
Also wonder and morality. Poems and drawings that treat children as sharp enough for nonsense, grief, greed and wonder—and adults as people who never quite grew out of either.
John Muir, 1911
Also wonder and nature. A young Scot joins a sheep drive into the high Sierra in 1869 and writes daily, ecstatic journal entries about granite, light and water, as if seeing mountains for the first time.
Mary Austin, 1903
Also wonder and nature. Field notes from the California desert — yuccas, buzzards, lone prospectors, Paiute basket makers — seen with a poet's eye and a resident's patience.
Γιώργος Σαραντάρης, 1940
Also wonder and nature. Poems written in the last year of a short life: sea, light and the dead spoken of without dread.
James Joyce, 1907
Also nature and melancholy. The poems Joyce wrote before Ulysses: love lyrics built like songs, and later, darker pieces from Trieste and Paris, short enough to read standing up.
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