greykit.poetry — #sonnet
-
1928
[w-b-yeats]
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow, and the whole Trojan war folded into it — the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead — closing on the question of whether she put on his knowledge with his power.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns — no mockeries, no prayers; their only memorial the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
Everything mortal does one thing — selves, goes itself, cries What I do is me — and the sestet turns that on the just man, in whose limbs and eyes Christ plays in ten thousand places.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Carrion Comfort
One of the terrible sonnets: a refusal to feast on despair, and a wrestling match with a lion-limbed God that the speaker only afterwards realises he was cheering — that night, that year of now done darkness, I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Felix Randal
A priest's elegy for a farrier he anointed — the big-boned and hardy-handsome man broken by sickness, tears touched by a child's touch, and at the last the great grey drayhorse and the bright and battering sandal.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God — yet men sear and smear the soil, shod from feeling it; and yet the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world with warm breast and bright wings.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Pied Beauty
A curtal sonnet of thanksgiving for dappled things — brinded skies, rose-moles on trout, finches' wings, landscape plotted and pieced — all fathered-forth by a beauty past change.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
The Windhover
Watching a kestrel ride the morning wind, Hopkins finds mastery — the achieve of the thing — that buckles into the beauty of Christ; even the plough-share, shéer plód, flashes gold-vermillion.
-
1898
[thomas-hardy]
Hap
A vengeful god would at least be an answer; what the poem finds instead is Crass Casualty and dicing Time, purblind Doomsters who had as readily strown blisses about the pilgrimage as pain.
-
1883
[emma-lazarus]
The New Colossus
Not the brazen giant of Greek fame but a Mother of Exiles with a torch, whose silent lips ask for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free — the lines later cast on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal.
-
1862
[christina-rossetti]
Remember
Rossetti urges her beloved to remember her after death, then revises the plea — better he should forget and smile than remember and be sad.
-
1850
[elizabeth-barrett-browning]
Sonnet 43: How Do I Love Thee?
Barrett Browning counts the ways she loves her husband — to the depth, breadth, and height her soul can reach, with passion, purity, childhood faith, and all her life's breath.
-
1848
[john-keats]
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Fear of dying before the pen has gleaned the teeming brain, and of never again looking on the fair creature of an hour — resolved by standing alone on the shore of the wide world until love and fame sink to nothing.
-
1838
[john-keats]
Bright Star
Keats's last sonnet — not to be fixed in lone, patient, priestlike vigil like the star, but steadfast in one thing: pillowed upon his fair love's ripening breast, awake forever in a sweet unrest, or else swoon to death.
-
1819
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, princes who are the dregs of their dull race, a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field — a catalogue of graves from which a glorious Phantom may burst.
-
1818
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Ozymandias
A traveller's report of a ruined desert statue whose pedestal proclaims the vast ambitions of a king whose works have wholly vanished.
-
1816
[john-keats]
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Reading Chapman's Homer for the first time, described as an astronomer finding a new planet and as Cortez on a peak in Darien — the whole poem arriving at one silence, upon a peak.
-
1807
[william-wordsworth]
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803
Standing on Westminster Bridge at dawn, Wordsworth finds London more beautiful than any natural scene — the city lying open to sky and fields in smokeless morning calm.
-
1807
[william-wordsworth]
The world is too much with us
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers — a sonnet that would sooner be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn than go on being unmoved by the sea that bares her bosom to the moon.
-
1673
[john-milton]
Sonnet XIX: When I consider how my light is spent
Blind before half his days are done, the poet asks whether God exacts day-labour of a man he has left in the dark — and patience answers before the question is finished: they also serve who only stand and waite.
-
1673
[john-milton]
Sonnet XV: On the late Massacher in Piemont
Written on the slaughter of the Waldensians in 1655: Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd Saints — mothers and infants rolled down the rocks, their moans redoubled from the vales to the hills to heaven, their blood sown to grow a hundredfold against the triple tyrant.
-
1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet X: Death be not proud
Death is addressed to its face and steadily demoted — from dreadful power to a slave of fate and chance, no better than poppy or charms at bringing sleep — until the last line kills it outright.
-
1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart, three person’d God
A prayer that asks God to stop knocking and start breaking: the speaker is a usurped town whose viceroy reason has proved untrue, and only being imprisoned can free him, only being ravished can make him chaste.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Love defined by what it refuses to do: it does not alter when it finds alteration, does not bend to the remover, is the fixed star by which a wandering ship is steered — and the poet stakes his whole work on the claim being true.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 129: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Lust anatomised across all three tenses at once — hunted past reason, hated past reason the moment it is had, a bliss in proof and a very woe once proved — and the world knows this perfectly well, and shuns nothing.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 130: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
A systematic demolition of every Petrarchan compliment — the eyes, lips, breasts, hair, cheeks, breath and voice all fail the comparison, and the woman walks on the ground — which turns out to be the point: his love is as rare as any belied with false compare.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 146: Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth
The body as a costly mansion on a short lease, gaudily painted while the soul inside starves; the remedy is to let the flesh pine and feed the soul on its loss, buying terms divine — and so feed on Death, that feeds on men.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Summer is too short, too rough, too soon overcast to be the compliment it seems — so the poem hands the beloved a better season, an eternal summer held open by the lines themselves, which outlast both weather and death for as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
Outcast, friendless and sick with envy of every better-favoured man, the speaker is lifted clear by one thought of the beloved — the lark rising from sullen earth — and ends refusing to trade places with kings.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
Memory convened like a court: the speaker summons up remembrance of things past, re-weeps friends long dead and pays old griefs over again as if they had never been settled — until one thought of a dear friend cancels the whole account.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 55: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Against war, masonry and all-oblivious enmity the poem sets nothing but itself, and wagers that the rhyme will carry the beloved further than any statue of a prince — alive in lovers’ eyes until the judgment day.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
Minutes press forward like waves on shingle; Time crowns what it has raised only to transfix it, delving parallels in beauty's brow and mowing everything down — and still the verse expects to stand, praising a worth that outlives the cruel hand.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
If sad mortality overwhelms brass and stone and the sea itself, what plea can beauty possibly hold? The sonnet finds one strong hand only — black ink, in which the miracle of a love may still shine bright.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Three images of ending — bare boughs where the birds sang, the twilight after sunset, a fire dying on the ashes of its own youth — arrive at the paradox that seeing the end makes the love stronger: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.
-
1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 94: They that have power to hurt and will do none
A cold, unsettling praise of those who can wound and don't — lords and owners of their faces, unmoved as stone — that turns on itself in the couplet: the summer's flower is sweet only until it festers, and lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.