greykit.poetry — #time
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1906
[rudyard-kipling]
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Empires bloom and fall like flowers — each blossom certain its brief season is forever.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
A Dream within a Dream
Poe asks whether a life lived as a dream is therefore less real — then stands on a surf-tormented shore, watching the golden sands slip through his fingers, unable to save even one grain from the pitiless wave.
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1820
[john-keats]
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Meditating on the frozen figures of an ancient urn, Keats finds that unheard melodies surpass the heard, and that the urn's last lesson to man is that beauty and truth are one.
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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.
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1681
[andrew-marvell]
To his Coy Mistress
Three moves: if there were world enough and time he would spend an age on each part of her; there is not, and time's winged chariot is audible behind them; therefore tear their pleasures through the iron gates of life.
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1648
[robert-herrick]
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may — the sun is always further along its race, the first age is always the best, and coyness costs more than it seems: having lost but once your prime, you may for ever tarry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.