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Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Kissing Tennyson...or any of our dear, old poets





Always on the lookout to add to my poetry collection...

We cannot touch
Miles, years apart
Save for the brush
Of heart to heart

Fingers and lips
May never meet
Your kiss of words
Bitter and sweet

Yet, without salvaged
Madrigal
We never would
Have met at all

© Janet Martin

I love reading old poetry...today at YDP they are featuring a beaut by James Whitcomb Riley.

...but, it was this poem The Brook by Alfred Tennyson that first captured my heart when I was a wee girl and sparked a lifelong love for lyrical poetry...

The Brook

COME from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
 
By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
 
Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
 
I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.
 
With many a curve my banks I fret
by many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.
 
I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may comeand men may go,
But I go on forever.
 
I wind about, and in and out,
with here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,
 
And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silver water-break
Above the golden gravel,
 
And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
 
I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.
 
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.
 
I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
 
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.



 

2 comments:

  1. Oh, I love this one! I am such a lover of old poets, too. The Tennyson one is wonderful too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Debbie, Thank-you. They are special, those old poems and poets!

    ReplyDelete

I hope you enjoyed your pause on this porch and thank-you for your visit!