Holy Sonnet XIV

JOHN DONNE

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The Snake

EMILY DICKINSON

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides —

You may have met Him — did you not

His notice sudden is —

The Grass divides as with a Comb —

A spotted shaft is seen —

And then it closes at your feet

And opens further on —

He likes a Boggy Acre

A Floor too cool for Corn

Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot —

I more than once at Noon

Have passed, I thought, a Whip Lash

Unbraiding in the Sun

When stooping to secure it

It wrinkled, and was gone —

Several of Nature’s People

I know, and they know me —

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality —

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone

Without a tighter breathing

And Zero at the Bone —

[Recited 17 August 2017]

Sonnet 18.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

[Recited 21 July 2017]

Pied Beauty

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                             Praise him.

[Recited 4 July 2017]

Ozymandias

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land, 

     Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert.   Near them, on the sand, 

     Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. 

And on the pedestal, these words appear: 

     ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, 

     The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Assault

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

[Recited 9 May 2017]

Prayer. (I)

GEORGE HERBERT

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,

     Gods breath in man returning to his birth,

     The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinners towre,

     Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

     The six-daies world transposing in an houre,

A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and  blisse,

     Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,

     Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,

The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

     Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,

     The land of spices; something understood.

[Recited 17 April 2017]

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

EMILY DICKINSON

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –  
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –  
To an admiring Bog!

[Recited 26 March 2017]

Loomings

HERMAN MELVILLE

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

[Recited 16 March 2017]

Give Me the Lowest Place

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Give me the lowest place: not that I dare
  Ask for that lowest place, but Thou hast died
That I might live and share
  Thy glory by Thy side.

Give me the lowest place: or if for me
  That lowest place too high, make one more low
Where I may sit and see
  My God and love Thee so.

[Recited 28 February 2017]

Sonnet 30

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
   All losses are restored and sorrows end.

[Recited 25 February 2017]

In the Valley of the Elwy

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

I remember a house where all were good
  To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:
  Comforting smell breathed at very entering,
Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood.
That cordial air made those kind people a hood
  All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing
  Will, or mild nights the new morsels of spring:
Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should.

Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales;
  Only the inmate does not correspond:
God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,
Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,
  Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.

[Recited 15 February 2017]