Traducers
Kinder the enemy who must malign us,
Than the smug friend who will define us
Angry poems
Angry poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Nervous Prostration
I MARRIED a man of the Croydon class
When I was twenty-two.
And I vex him, and he bores me
Till we don't know what to do!
It isn't good form in the Croydon class
To say you love your wife,
So I spend my days with the tradesmen's books
And pray for the end of life.
In green fields are blossoming trees
And a golden wealth of gorse.
And young birds sing for joy of worms:
It's perfectly clear, of course,
That it wouldn't be taste in the Croydon class
To sing over dinner or tea:
But I sometimes wish the gentleman
Would turn and talk to me!
Sung to the Social Reformer
Leave us our sorrows,
Take not our tears,
For long to-morrows
Of too perfect years.
To the New-born can you deny
The world-old solace of a cry;
Or to hot Youth the eternal right
To win his having with a fight?
Leave us our sorrows,
Take not our tears,
For long to-morrows
Of too perfect years.
The Economist
It must be true I love you well
Since your light words are whips of Hell.
But who has pain has songs to sell.
My profitable Friends, farewell!
The Conscience
Deadly destructive to my man and me
Are my rare fits of sore morality.
A mad, domestic hell begins
When woman hides her virtues, and displays her sins.
Gift to a Jade
For love he offered me his perfect world.
This world was so constricted, and so small,
It had no sort of loveliness at all,
And I flung back the little silly ball.
At that cold moralist I hotly hurled,
His perfect pure symmetrical small world.
For Poets, Workmen, Women, and Children in Orphanages
With wine or with faith, with love or with song,
Let me be drunken all my life long.
On hills of ecstasy, in troughs of pain,
Never more sober, never more sane.
For I lived too long in a den
Of sane and solemn men.
Each merciless as a beast.
And my spirit was their feast.
They sucked my soul from me
All for the sake of holy Uniformity.
Vintage
I will mix me a drink of stars,--
Large stars with polychrome needles,
Small stars jetting maroon and crimson,
Cool, quiet, green stars.
I will tear them out of the sky,
And squeeze them over an old silver cup,
And I will pour the cold scorn of my Beloved into it,
So that my drink shall be bubbled with ice.
It will lap and scratch
As I swallow it down;
And I shall feel it as a serpent of fire,
Coiling and twisting in my belly.
His snortings will rise to my head,
And I shall be hot, and laugh,
Forgetting that I have ever known a woman.
Miscast I
I have whetted my brain until it is like a Damascus blade,
So keen that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by,
So sharp that the air would turn its edge
Were it to be twisted in flight.
Licking passions have bitten their arabesques into it,
And the mark of them lies, in and out,
Worm-like,
With the beauty of corroded copper patterning white steel.
My brain is curved like a scimitar,
And sighs at its cutting
Like a sickle mowing grass.
But of what use is all this to me!
I, who am set to crack stones
In a country lane!
To an Intruder
Because I show a guarded face
To all the world but one or two,
And in my heart's most secret place
Consider lilies, why should you
Whose roses grow in common ground
Profane the cloister I have found?
Things
Sometimes when I am at tea with you
I catch my breath
At a thought that is old as the world is old
And more bitter than death.
It is that the spoon that you just laid down
And the cup that you hold
May be here shining and insolent
When you are still and cold.
Your careless note that I laid away
May leap to my eyes like flame
When the world has almost forgotten your voice
Or the sound of your name.
The golden Virgin da Vinci drew
May smile on over my head,
And daffodils nod in the silver vase
When you are dead.
I Sit and Sew
I sit and sew--a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams--
The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath--
But--I must sit and sew.
I sit and sew--my heart aches with desire--
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe--
But--I must sit and sew.--
The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
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