Soup Kitchen: My Favourite Poems

Hart Crane: Chaplinesque (1926)

2008-05-21T20:12:00.002+01:00

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with some random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and to ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Hart Crane: Poems selected by Maurice O'Riordan

Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil And Stella, LIX (ca. 1582)

2008-05-20T16:46:00.003+01:00

Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?
If he do love, I burn, I burn in love;
If he wait well, I never thence would move;
If he be fair, yet but a dog can be.
Little he is, so little worth is he;
He barks, my songs thy own voice oft doth prove;
Bidden, perhaps he fetcheth thee a glove;
But I unbid fetch even my soul to thee.
Yet while I languish, him that bosom clips,
That lap doth lap, nay lets, in spite of spite,
This sour-breathed mate taste of those sugared lips.
Alas, if you grant only such delight
To witless things, then love, I hope (since wit
Becomes a clog) will soon ease me of it.

Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works

Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Kraken (1830)

2008-05-19T09:16:00.006+01:00

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battering upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems