WORDS TO REVIVE
(These are individual lines from various poems.)
Walt Whitman
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine
Have you reckoned the earth much?
Urge and urge and urge
Sure as the most certain sure
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul
I am satisfied- I see, dance, laugh, sing
What is a man anyhow? What am I? What are you?
I wear my hat as I please indoors or out
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow
I see that the elementary laws never apologize
There is no better than it and now
The clock determining the minute- but what does eternity indicate?
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds and the sea-gluten
O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth
I have not once had the least idea who or what I am
With peals of distant ironical laughter.
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles
From the storm the long calm, the darkness, the swell
With every leaf a miracle
With the tolling tolling bells' perpetual clang
These and with these, and the breath of my chant
The gentle soft born measureless light
Large unconscious scenery
Heavenly aerial beauty
And the streets how their throbbings throbb'd
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul+
And that kelson of the creation is love
Robert Browning
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are
Mazed, motionless and moonstruck- I'm the man
Dreams? Strive to do and agonize to do
John Dryden
Dim as the borrowed beams of moons and stars
Unmade, unmoved, yet making, moving all
Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll/Without a centre where to fix the soul
We, made to serve, and in that service blest
This general worship is to praise and pray/One part to borrow blessings, one to pay
So Reason's glimmering ray was lent, not to assure our doubtful way/
But to guide us upward to a better day
(Reason) So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light
William Wordsworth
More like a man flying from something that he dreads/
Than one who sought the thing he loved
An appetite, a feeling, and a love
How is it that you live, and what is it you do?
I cannot measure my way: I breathe again
Samuel Coleridge
He prayeth well, who loveth well/Both man and bird and beast
Edmond Spencer
She brought her to her joyous Paradise
John Keats
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star
Like a rose could shut and become a bud again
Made tunable with every sweet vow
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness
Made purple riot
Upon the honeyed middle of the night
More happy love! More happy, happy love
Alas flit, flit like a ghost away
Fled is that music
Murmurous haunt of flies on a summer eve
The weariness, the fever, the fret
Alone and palely loitering
Never on such a night have lovers met/Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt
Will Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Things without all remedy/Should be without regard, what is done is done
We have scotched the snake, not killed it
What, can the devil speak true?
Full of scorpions is my mind
Double, double toil and trouble/Fire burn, and cauldron bubble
T'is safer to be that which we destroy/Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy
Throw physic to the dogs/I'll none of it
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