Rage Poems Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Rage Poems. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas (In Country Sleep, and Other Poems)
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage)
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas (Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)
Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.
Kahlil Gibran (The Forerunner: His Parables and Poems)
Caged Bird A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own. But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou (The Complete Collected Poems)
Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair Of not being able to express With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout, The bleeding of my heart.
Fernando Pessoa (A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems)
Aubade I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Philip Larkin (Collected Poems)
We can gain a lot more striving for harmonious coexistence than we can by giving in to hate-filled rage and fear-driven ignorance.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth -- that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves -- that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night -- so the rope, paper, knife.
Tadeusz Borowski
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.
George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)
If abandoned rage asks, Who should answer for this?/ Say, the very blood of our lives eats composure up.
Claudia Rankine (The End of the Alphabet: Poems)
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Paul Engle
They kept trying to make me less angry, but I refuse to surrender my rage.
Nikita Gill (Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul)
Yawn... I believe that I love sleep much more than anybody I’ve ever met. I have the ability to sleep for 2 or 3 days and nights. I will go to bed at any given moment. I often confused my girlfriends this way— say it would be about onethirty in the afternoon: “well, I’m going to bed now, I’m going to sleep…” most of them wouldn’t mind, they would go to bed with me thinking I was hinting for sex but I would just turn my back and snore off. this, of course, could explain why so many of my girlfriends left me. as for doctors, they were never any help: “listen, I have this desire to go to bed and sleep, almost all the time. what is wrong with me?” “do you get enough exercise?” “yes…” “are you getting enough nourishment?” “yes…” they always handed me a prescription which I threw away between the office and the parking lot. it’s a curious malady because I can’t sleep between 6 p.m. and midnight. it must occur after midnight and when I arise it can never be before noon. and should the phone ring say at 10:30 a.m. I go into a mad rage don’t even ask who the caller is scream into the phone: “WHAT ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR AT THIS HOUR!” hang up… every person, I suppose, has their eccentricities but in an effort to be normal in the world’s eye they overcome them and therefore destroy their special calling. I’ve kept mine and do believe that they have lent generously to my existence. I think it’s the main reason I decided to become a writer: I can type anytime and sleep when I damn well please.
Charles Bukowski
A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage. A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons Shudders hell thro' all its regions. A dog starv'd at his master's gate Predicts the ruin of the state. A horse misused upon the road Calls to heaven for human blood. Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain does tear. A skylark wounded in the wing, A cherubim does cease to sing. The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight Does the rising sun affright. Every wolf's and lion's howl Raises from hell a human soul. - "Auguries of Innocence
William Blake (The Complete Poems)
Tree I dreamt you invisible majesty hovering above the face of all things. Rooted in the pain of ash, mere man, I bore you, sepulchre, dead father, silently, within, called out to you the windswept words of lost millennia, words that kindle rage. You never answered me. You left me fearing night, hidden fire, leaping flame, tree God in the night.
Salvador Espriu (Selected Poems of Salvador Espriu (English, Catalan and Catalan Edition))
Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing. That star-enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground; And all the night you sing. My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song, then loses it again In moonlight on the lawn. Now is your voice a marble high and white, Then like a mist on fields of paradise, Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, Then breaks, and it is dawn.
Harold Monro (Collected poems;)
It is that something in the soul which says,—Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain.
Walt Whitman (Poems by Walt Whitman)
what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?
Naomi Shihab Nye (19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East)
..Breaking yet budding, dying yet living - standing amongst ruins and rage, reaching for possibilities playing hard to get.
Meraaqi (Divine Trouble)
There are always flowers, Love cries, or blood. Someone is always leaving By exile, death, or heartbreak. The heart is a fist. It pockets prayer or holds rage.
Joy Harjo (An American Sunrise)
As he stands a breath away and takes me here tonight my raging storm inside grows silent and all the world is right
Annalise Grey (Ramblings of a Tired Mind: Poems)
I forgot to sup annoyance from his glass full of mingled dread and rage Now let me take a small draught of solace from my own little cup full of predicaments! From the poem- Draught
Munia Khan (Beyond The Vernal Mind)
We grow old judging others And ourselves Until life humbles us And makes scared children of us Longing to hold another’s hand To hear their kind words And witness their kind deeds done on our behalf. But like children, We sabotage everything For nothing satisfies us Until life crumbles us And we are no more.
Kamand Kojouri
Know that...there's plenty of food and of course popcorn on the dining-room table. Just...help yourself. If that runs out just let me know. Don't panic. And there's coffee, both caff and decaf, and soft drinks and juice in the kitchen, and plenty of ice in the freezer so...let me know if you have any questions with that.' And lastly, since I have you all here in one place, I have something to share with you. Along the garden ways just now...I too heard the flowers speak. They told me that our family garden has all but turned to sand. I want you to know I've watered and nurtured this square of earth for nearly twenty years, and waited on my knees each spring for these gentle bulbs to rise, reborn. But want does not bring such breath to life. Only love does. The plain, old-fashioned kind. In our family garden my husband is of the genus Narcissus , which includes daffodils and jonquils and a host of other ornamental flowers. There is, in such a genus of man, a pervasive and well-known pattern of grandiosity and egocentrism that feeds off this very kind of evening, this type of glitzy generosity. People of this ilk are very exciting to be around. I have never met anyone with as many friends as my husband. He made two last night at Carvel. I'm not kidding. Where are you two? Hi. Hi, again. Welcome. My husband is a good man, isn't he? He is. But in keeping with his genus, he is also absurdly preoccupied with his own importance, and in staying loyal to this, he can be boastful and unkind and condescending and has an insatiable hunger to be seen as infallible. Underlying all of the constant campaigning needed to uphold this position is a profound vulnerability that lies at the very core of his psyche. Such is the narcissist who must mask his fears of inadequacy by ensuring that he is perceived to be a unique and brilliant stone. In his offspring he finds the grave limits he cannot admit in himself. And he will stop at nothing to make certain that his child continually tries to correct these flaws. In actuality, the child may be exceedingly intelligent, but has so fully developed feelings of ineptitude that he is incapable of believing in his own possibilities. The child's innate sense of self is in great jeopardy when this level of false labeling is accepted. In the end the narcissist must compensate for this core vulnerability he carries and as a result an overestimation of his own importance arises. So it feeds itself, cyclically. And, when in the course of life they realize that their views are not shared or thier expectations are not met, the most common reaction is to become enraged. The rage covers the fear associated with the vulnerable self, but it is nearly impossible for others to see this, and as a result, the very recognition they so crave is most often out of reach. It's been eighteen years that I've lived in service to this mindset. And it's been devastating for me to realize that my efforts to rise to these standards and demands and preposterous requests for perfection have ultimately done nothing but disappoint my husband. Put a person like this with four developing children and you're gonna need more than love poems and ice sculpture to stay afloat. Trust me. So. So, we're done here.
Joshua Braff (The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green)
A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing
Robert Hass (Sun under Wood)
Blow on, ye death fraught whirlwinds! blow, Around the rocks, and rifted caves; Ye demons of the gulf below! I hear you, in the troubled waves. High on this cliff, which darkness shrouds In night's impenetrable clouds, My solitary watch I keep, And listen, while the turbid deep Groans to the raging tempests, as they roll Their desolating force, to thunder at the pole. Eternal world of waters, hail! Within thy caves my Lover lies; And day and night alike shall fail Ere slumber lock my streaming eyes. Along this wild untrodden coast, Heap'd by the gelid' hand of frost; Thro' this unbounded waste of seas, Where never sigh'd the vernal breeze; Mine was the choice, in this terrific form, To brave the icy surge, to shiver in the storm. Yes! I am chang'd - My heart, my soul, Retain no more their former glow. Hence, ere the black'ning tempests roll, I watch the bark, in murmurs low, (While darker low'rs the thick'ning' gloom) To lure the sailor to his doom; Soft from some pile of frozen snow I pour the syren-song of woe; Like the sad mariner's expiring cry, As, faint and worn with toil, he lays him down to die. Then, while the dark and angry deep Hangs his huge billows high in air ; And the wild wind with awful sweep, Howls in each fitful swell - beware! Firm on the rent and crashing mast, I lend new fury to the blast; I mark each hardy cheek grow pale, And the proud sons of courage fail; Till the torn vessel drinks the surging waves, Yawns the disparted main, and opes its shelving graves. When Vengeance bears along the wave The spell, which heav'n and earth appals; Alone, by night, in darksome cave, On me the gifted wizard calls. Above the ocean's boiling flood Thro' vapour glares the moon in blood: Low sounds along the waters die, And shrieks of anguish fill the' sky; Convulsive powers the solid rocks divide, While, o'er the heaving surge, the embodied spirits glide. Thrice welcome to my weary sight, Avenging ministers of Wrath! Ye heard, amid the realms of night, The spell that wakes the sleep of death. Where Hecla's flames the snows dissolve, Or storms, the polar skies involve; Where, o'er the tempest-beaten wreck, The raging winds and billows break; On the sad earth, and in the stormy sea, All, all shall shudd'ring own your potent agency. To aid your toils, to scatter death, Swift, as the sheeted lightning's force, When the keen north-wind's freezing breath Spreads desolation in its course, My soul within this icy sea, Fulfils her fearful destiny. Thro' Time's long ages I shall wait To lead the victims to their fate; With callous heart, to hidden rocks decoy, And lure, in seraph-strains, unpitying, to destroy.
Anne Bannerman (Poems by Anne Bannerman.)
Fanaticism is, in reference to superstition, what delirium is to fever, or rage to anger.
Voltaire (VOLTAIRE - Premium Collection: Novels, Philosophical Writings, Historical Works, Plays, Poems & Letters (60+ Works in One Volume) - Illustrated: Candide, ... the Atheist, Dialogues, Oedipus, Caesar…)
I think I'm engaged To thirty-six women, my harem: Platonic, bookish, and enraged.
Sherman Alexie (War Dances)
Vase [Why weep Come back tomorrow There are also poisonous flowers and flowers always open in the evening she loves the cinema she has been in Russia Love married with disdain Pearl-studded watch a trip to Montrouge Maisons- Lafitte and everything finishes in perfumes remember Let the flower bloom and let the fruit rot and let the grain sprout while the storms rage]
Guillaume Apollinaire (Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916))
Za ba wale hairan nah yam za ba wale pa khafghan nah yam. koor zama har waqt wranagey numm zama bad-namakage da wale dase kage da wale nah jor-e-rage da insaf darwazee bande da afghan bachai markagi.
Abed Rahmani
Such seem'd this Man, not all alive nor dead,   Nor all asleep; in his extreme old age:   His body was bent double, feet and head   Coming together in their pilgrimage;   As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage   Of sickness felt by him in times long past,   A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.
William Wordsworth (Poems in Two Volumes, Volume 1)
How sweet I roam'd from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, 'Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide! He shew'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; He led me through his gardens fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow. With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage; He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.
William Blake (The Complete Poems)
Pythagoras argued that the souls of poets pass not from this world but lodge themselves in the breastwork of swans. Let it be, then. Let some of us withdraw to the keel-shaped bones to the tilted orrery of the thorax. But I think: if poets coalesce as swans we're mostly in the feet of swans, black as drums pressing our rageful webbing into the earth's flank.
Kiki Petrosino (Hymn for the Black Terrific: Poems)
HIS chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' Everything he wrote was read, After certain years he won Sufficient money for his need, Friends that have been friends indeed; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. ' What then?' All his happier dreams came true -- A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, poets and Wits about him drew; 'What then.?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' The work is done,' grown old he thought, 'According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought'; But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
I am a runaway, lost at sea. I am a broken bird, yearning to fly free. I am a sinner, unworthy and unholy. I am a rose, wilting slowly. I am a raindrop, touching your cheek. I am a child who plays hide and seek. I am nothing, and yet I am everything. I am contradictions and complexities. I am a face with a hundred entities. I am love and I am hate. I am the voice that cannot communicate. I am a melody, haunting and sad. I am a soul that has slowly gone mad. I am death in a living body. I am a dangerous opium poppy. I am rage, running through my veins. I am pain, bound in chains. I am isolation, imprisoned in my mind. I am abandoned and left behind. I am tenderness, soft and kind. I am trust, naïve and blind. I am remorse, shattered and frozen. I am the path I have not chosen. I am sadness, drowning in an ocean. I am faith, yearning for devotion. I am madness, rebellious and wild. I am sanity, safely filed. I am wisdom, cursed and blessed. I am a name that will burn in your chest. I am a journey, destination unknown. I am a heart turned to stone. I am forever alone.
Mina Alexia
We also fought about everything -- like real sisters. We fought about money, bedrooms, whose car to take. Everyone of these fights was actually about something else -- usually abandonment. I wanted to be first on her list and she wanted to be first on mine. I wanted all her attention, all her love, all her care. I wanted her to be my mommy, my daddy, my sister. She wanted the same from me. She wanted to be fed, cared for, nurtured without limit. She wanted backrubs, poems, pastas, and to be left alone when she needed to be left alone. She wanted to come before my writing, my child, my man. And I wanted no less from her. She was sick at first, so I took care of her. Then I was jealous of the attention and she took care of me. We had gone down into the primal cave of our friendship. we had felt loved enough to rage and fight, to show the inside of our naked throats and our bared fags, and the friendship took another leap toward intimacy. Without rage, intimacy can't be.
Erica Jong (Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir)
Yes You Are! Like the Blossoming rose, Like the Rays of hope. Like a deer in the forest, Like an athlete full of zest. Like a lamp in temple, Like the life feeling ample. Like the feel of the dawn, Like the grace of the swan. Like the melody of sitar, Like the rage of guitar. Like a group of angels in the sky, Like the pot that makes you high. Like the peacock's dance, Like she is the romance. Like the silent talk, Like the wine from Medoc. Like the colors of life, Like the music from the fife. Like the calmness of the cold wind Like the beauty of the hind.
Ameya Agrawal (A Leap Within)
Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why. “In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot. But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love. I will die. You will die. The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.
Maria Popova (Figuring)
And we, frightened, bored, wanting only to sleep till catastrophe has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us, wanting then to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony, we who in shamefaced private hope had looked to be plucked from fire and given a bliss we deserved for having imagined it, is it implied that we must protect this perversely weak animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings suppose there is milk to be found in us? Must hold to our icy hearts a shivering God?
Denise Levertov (Selected Poems)
They should not clench their fists, it’s my longing that’s drawing me near to them; they should not stand there full of rage, my longing is timidly drawing near to them; they should not be ready to pounce like vicious dogs, as if they wanted to tear my longing to shreds; they should not threaten with broad sleeves, that pains my longing. Why have they suddenly changed? As great and deep is my longing. No matter how difficult, no matter how menacing: I must reach them and I’m already there.
Robert Walser (Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser)
Fifteen years ago, the cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote of Jimi's performance of our national anthem as "his great NO to the war, to racism, to whatever you or he might think of and want gone. But then that discord shattered, and for more than four and a half long, complex minutes Hendrix pursued each invisible crack in a vessel that had once been whole, feeling out and exploring and testing himself and his music against anguish, rage, fear, hate, love offered, and love refused. When he finished, he had created an anthem that could never be summed up and that would never come to rest. In the end it was a great YES, both a threat and a beckoning, an invitation to America to match its danger, glamour, and freedom." ... In late 1969, Jimi Hendrix wrote a poem celebrating Woodstock, saying with words what his music had in August: "500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God's tears of joy. And for once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery.
Michael Lang (The Road to Woodstock)
We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start.
Thomas Curtis Clark (1000 Quotable Poems: An Anthology of Modern Verse)
Division and separation means no harm to the society. It makes everyone unique.
Michael Bassey Johnson (The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes)
So when you're told that your age is reactionary, Remind yourself that your rage is our right.
Amanda Gorman (Call Us What We Carry: Poems)
Girls are cruelest to themselves.
Anne Carson (The Glass Essay)
Avoid the stage of old age sit in the audience, it's all the rage
Benny Bellamacina (Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems)
They’ll reenter their lives’ cages, where love’s tiger sometimes rages, but the beast’s too tame to bite.   We’ll
Wisława Szymborska (Poems New and Collected)
And what was really mine? A handful of rupees and a mind packed tight with rage.
Zilka Joseph (Sharp Blue Search of Flame (Made in Michigan Writer Series))
Though lads are making pikes again For some conspiracy, And crazy rascals rage their fill At human tyranny; My contemplations are of Time That has transfigured me.
W.B. Yeats (Collected Poems (Macmillan Collector's Library Book 13))
In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.
Dylan Thomas (Collected Poems)
But I withhold my pen; for vain were the fancy, by treatise or sermon or poem or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self -- God's idea of us when he devised us -- the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which, most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for.
George MacDonald (Sir Gibbie (Sir Gibbie, #1))
The fury of confession, at first, then the fury of clarity: It was from you, Death, that such hypocritical obscure feeling was born! And now let them accuse me of every passion, let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed, impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer. You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life, I’m on the stake. I play the card of fire and I win this little, immense goodness of mine. I can do it, for I have suffered you too much! I return to you as an émigré returns to his own country and rediscovers it: I made a fortune (in the intellect) and I’m happy, as I once was, destitute of any norm, a black rage of poetry in my breast. A crazy old-age youth. Once your joy was confused with terror, it’s true, and now almost with other joy, livid and arid, my passion deluded. Now you really frighten me, for you are truly close to me, part of my angry state, of obscure hunger, of the anxiety almost of a new being.
Pier Paolo Pasolini (Roman Poems)
And to be hauled out, in a windowless room Somewhere near Paddington to Radio 5 Live? To be born purple, your hair scrambled like eggs? I have never heard a person so incredulous with rage.
Hannah Sullivan (Three Poems)
I need to talk to one of the Zuulaman Blood," Andulvar said. "They are gone," Draca replied. "From Terreille, yes. But there must be some who are demon-dead. You could arrange this." "They are gone," she repeated. "The Dark Realm wass purged of Zuulaman Blood." Andulvar grabbed one of the chairs that surrounded the table to keep himself upright. "You purged Hell ?" "No." "Then... ?" "The Prince of the Darknesss. The High Lord of Hell." Draca stared at him. "Grief wass the hammer they ussed to break hiss control. Rage wass the forge in which he sshaped hiss power into a weapon." "So there's no one left." "There's no one left," Geoffrey agreed. He looked at Draca. "If Saetan did what we think he did, there isn't a shard of pottery, a scrap of cloth, or a line from a poem, story, or song left that came from the Zuulaman people. There isn't any trace of them in any of the Realms." Including the islands they came from, Andulvar thought, feeling sick. "It's as if they never existed," Geoffrey said.
Anne Bishop (Dreams Made Flesh (The Black Jewels, #5))
you, my friend, could be the smoke’s daughter, you who may not have known you were born of fire and rage, lightning over flaming lava etched your violet mouth, your sex in the scorched oak’s moss like a ring in a nest, your fingers there in the flames, your compact body rose from leaves of fire that make me recall there were bakers in your family tree, you’re still the rainforest’s bread, ash from violent wheat,
Pablo Neruda (Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems)
The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Oscar Wilde (The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions))
Oh, what a world we make, oppressor and oppressed. Our world-- this violent ghetto, slum of the spirit raging against itself. We hate kill destroy in the name of human good our killing and our hate destroy.
Robert Hayden (Collected Poems)
Battles of the hardest kind Are never fought by hand. They rage and fume inside the mind, And slay the inner man. Weapons that destroy a foe Elicit fear and pain. More violent is internal war That ravages the brain.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
Wayward has been my heart Drifter have I been all my life And then one day We bump into each other Souls looking for a harbor in the vast ocean Though I see the raging storm In your eyes You know and so do I know That I will stay by your side!
Avijeet Das
The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unloved life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives - even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available - because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children - it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice - that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we lean, at best, to ironize our wishes - that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true - and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.(…) There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unloved lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason - and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason - they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are. As we know more now than ever before about the kinds of lives it is possible to live - and affluence has allowed more people than ever before to think of their lives in terms of choices and options - we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell's poem, that "The ways we miss our lives is life", we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. We discover these unloved lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in the conscious 9and unconscious) demands we make on our children to become something that was beyond us. And, of course, in our daily frustrations. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage; though at its best it lures us into the future, but without letting us wonder why such lures are required (we become promising through the promises made to us). The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we eve do; and makes of our frustration a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions - How would we know if we had realized our potential? If we don't have potential what do we have? - we can't imagine our lives without the unloved lives they contain. We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. That our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.
Adam Phillips (Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life)
I don’t mean to say that when a forest is gone you can replace it with a poem. When a forest is gone, you cannot replace it. But with written words you can bear witness, you can hold a memory of the forest for others to experience and celebrate, you can grieve over the loss and rage against the forces that have leveled the forest- and through grief you can fall in love with forests again, and through that falling, you can believe again in the human capacity for love and in the faith that we might learn to protect what we love.
Alison Hawthorne Deming (Writing the Sacred into the Real)
I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the world has never heard before. Like Yeats's great outburst at the end of his life. This comes out of a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent, Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. The incredible difference between the achievement of A and the achievement of B is that B wanted it, so he made all kinds of sacrifices. A could have had it, but he didn’t give a damn.[...] But what I was going on to say is that I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, "Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm," but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I'm out, but short of that, I don't know. I hope to be nearly crucified,
John Berryman
Give winter nothing; hold; and let the flake Poise or dissolve along your upheld arms. All flawless hexagons may melt and break; While you must feel the summer's rage of fire, Beyond this frigid season's empty storms. Banished to bloom, and bear the birds' desire.
James Wright
Rage In me there is a rage to defy the order of the stars despite their pretty patterns. To see if Gods who hold forth now on human thrones can will away my lust to dare and press to order the anarchy I would serve. The silence between your words rams into me like a sword.
Alice Walker (Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems First Edition 1973)
Hecuba, the most powerful mortal woman in the poem, is exceptional in her ability to articulate her incandescent rage. She longs, like Hera, to destroy and even devour those who have wronged her, declaring of Achilles, “I wish I could latch my teeth into the center of his liver and eat it!”​(
Homer (The Iliad)
Don’t you dare say these times are hollow Just because there are storms raging by. Just lay low on your pillow, Close your eyes and say goodbye To the world that you lived in today. Let your dreams carry you away; You lived a nightmare all through the day, It is time to dream, so don’t delay. You searched for a reason to live, Yes darling, you searched everywhere. You had to push, you had to strive, It is time now to get some air. You searched in all that is outside, It is time now to look inside, Cause that is where you’ll find A reason worth keeping in your mind. These dreams are not an escape, darling, You need time to see past the lies that blind you. It is time for you to start running To those things that are true. So, don’t you dare say these nights are hollow, Just because there are storms raging by. Just lay low on your pillow And lose yourself in this lullaby.
Melita Tessy (Battle of the Spheres: Crust, Mantle and Core)
When I came to see you It hurt me how thin you had become In the months of addiction & disease & although your particular abyss Was a man & not a drug The degradation was the same The same wasting of the flesh The same tapped-out well emptied Of the least leaf of emotion The same frozen rage
David St. John (The Auroras: New Poems)
This poem throbs with rage, as though Eurydice has waited a couple of millennia to get all this off her chest. But it does not end in anger; it ends with a declaration: 'hell must break before I am lost,' she says, in the final stanza. Eurydice may be dead, but she is still triumphantly herself.
Natalie Haynes (Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths)
The aim of all is but to nurse the life With honour, wealth, and ease, in waning age; And in this aim there is such thwarting strife, That one for all, or all for one we gage; As life for honour in fell battles' rage; Honour for wealth; and oft that wealth doth cost The death of all, and all together lost.
William Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece)
to know a country takes all we know of love: some days better than others, but never easy to keep our promise every morning of every year, of every century, and wake up, stumble downstairs with all our raging hope, sit down at the kitchen table again, still blurry-eyed, still tired, and say: Listen, we need to talk.
Richard Blanco (How to Love a Country)
Ah for pittie, wil ranke Winters rage, These bitter blasts neuer ginne tasswage? The keene cold blowes throug my beaten hyde, All as I were through the body gryde. My ragged rontes all shiver and shake, As doen high Towers in an earthquake: They wont in the wind wagge their wrigle tailes, Perke as Peacock: but nowe it auales.
Edmund Spenser (The Shepherd's Calendar and Other Poems)
And now without redemption all mankind Must have been lost, adjudged to death and hell By doom severe, had not the Son of God, In whom the fullness dwells of love divine, His dearest mediation thus renewed. 'Father, Thy word is passed, man shall find grace; And shall grace not find means, that finds her way, The speediest of Thy winged messengers, To visit all Thy creatures, and to all Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought, Happy for man, so coming; he her aid Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost; Atonement for himself or offering meet, Indebted and undone, hath none to bring: Behold Me then, Me for him, life for life I offer, on Me let Thine anger fall; Account Me man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glory next to Thee Freely put off, and for him lastly die Well pleased, on Me let death wreak all his rage; Under his gloomy power I shall not long Lie vanquished; Thou hast given Me to possess Life in Myself forever, by Thee I live, Though now to death I yield, and am his due All that of Me can die, yet that debt paid, Thou wilt not leave Me in the loathsome grave His prey, nor suffer My unspotted soul Forever with corruption there to dwell; But I shall rise victorious, and subdue My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil; Death his death's wound shall then receive, and stoop Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed.
John Milton (Paradise Lost and Other Poems)
Two Songs For The World's End I Bombs ripen on the leafless tree under which the children play. And there my darling all alone dances in the spying day. I gave her nerves to feel her pain, I put her mortal beauty on. I taught her love that hate might find, its black work the easier done. I sent her out alone to play; and I must watch, and I must hear, how underneath the leafless tree, the children dance and sing with Fear. II Lighted by the rage of time where the blind and dying weep, in my shadow take your sleep, though wakeful I. Sleep unhearing while I pray - Should the red tent of the sky fall to fold your time away, wake to weep before you die. Die believing all is true that love your maker said to you Still believe that had you lived you would have found love, world, sight, sound, sorrow, beauty - all true. Grieve for death your moment - grieve. The world, the lover you must take, is the murderer you will meet. But if you die before you wake never think death sweet.
Judith A. Wright (Collected poems, 1942-1970)
How beautiful, how beautiful you streamed upon my sight, In glory and in grandeur, as a gorgeous sunset-light! How softly, soul-subduing, fell your words upon mine ear, Like low aerial music when some angel hovers near! What tremulous, faint ecstasy to clasp your hand in mine, Till the darkness fell upon me of a glory too divine! The air around grew languid with our intermingled breath, And in your beauty's shadow I sank motionless as death. I saw you not, I heard not, for a mist was on my brain--I only felt that life could give no joy like that again. And this was love--I knew it not, but blindly floated on, And now I'm on the ocean waste, dark, desolate, alone; The waves are raging round me-- I'm reckless where they guide; No hope is left to lighten me, no strength to stem the tide. As a leaf along the torrent, a cloud across the sky, As dust upon the whirlwind, so my life is drifting by. The dream that drank the meteor's light--the form from Heav'n has flown-- The vision and the glory, they are passing--they are gone. Oh! Love is frantic agony, and life one throb of pain; Yet I would bear its darkest woes to dream again.
A. Norman Jeffares (Ireland's Love Poems)
I wish I could descend From off this stage, And find an end, A grateful haven from this rage Of this drunk, blindly careless age ; From the row of this mad, hurried universe That cares more for carburettors than for poets, And seem to slide on down from worse to worse Oblivious of the sage And noble names That strive to keep it from the depth less curse Of meaningless enjoyment.
Richard Spender (Collected Poems)
MY FATHER If I have to write a poem about my father it has to be about integrity and kindness — the selfless kind of kindness that is so very rare I am sure there will be many people living somewhere who must be as kind as him but what I mean to say is I have not met one yet and when it comes to helping others he always helps too much and as the saying goes — help someone, you earn a friend. help someone too much, you make an enemy. — so you know the gist of what I’m trying to say here anyways I was talking about the poem about my father it has to be about passion and hard work because you see you cannot separate these things from him they are part of him as his two eyes and two hands and his heart and his soul and his whole being and you cannot separate wind and waves or living and the universe or earth and heavens and although he never got any award from bureaucracy the students he taught ages ago still touch his feet and some of them are the people you have to make an appointment to meet even if it is for two minutes of their time and that’s a reward for him bigger than any other that some of his colleagues got for their flattery and also I have to write about reliability as well because you see as the sun always rises and the snowflakes are always six-folds and the spring always comes and the petals of a sunflower and every flower follows the golden ratio of symmetry my father never fails to keep his promise I have to mention the rage as well that he always carries inside him like a burning fire for wrongdoings for injustice and now he carries a bitterness too for people who used him good and discarded as it always happens with every good man in our world of humans and you must be thinking he has learned his lessons well you go to him — it does not matter who you are if he knows you or you are a stranger from other side of the world — and ask for his help he will be happy to do so as you must know people never change not their soul in any case.
Neena H. Brar
There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls— it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? —Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem “The Wall Within” by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. “The Wall Within” was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record.
Kevin Sites (The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War)
Bearded Oaks" The oaks, how subtle and marine, Bearded, and all the layered light Above them swims; and thus the scene, Recessed, awaits the positive night. So, waiting, we in the grass now lie Beneath the languorous tread of light: The grassed, kelp-like, satisfy The nameless motions of the air. Upon the floor of light, and time, Unmurmuring, of polyp made, We rest; we are, as light withdraws, Twin atolls on a shelf of shade. Ages to our construction went, Dim architecture, hour by hour: And violence, forgot now, lent The present stillness all its power. The storm of noon above us rolled, Of light the fury, furious gold, The long drag troubling us, the depth: Dark is unrocking, unrippling, still. Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay descend, minutely whispering down, Silted down swaying streams, to lay Foundation for our voicelessness. All our debate is voiceless here, As all our rage, the rage of stone; If hope is hopeless, then fearless is fear, And history is thus undone. Our feet once wrought the hollow street With echo when the lamps were dead All windows, once our headlight glare Disturbed the doe that, leaping fled. I do not love you less that now The caged heart makes iron stroke, Or less that all that light once gave The graduate dark should now revoke. We live in time so little time And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for eternity.
Robert Penn Warren (The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren)
Vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self—God’s idea of us when He devised us—the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself…“but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.
George MacDonald (An Anthology: 365 Readings)
The Book Burnings When the regime ordered that books with harmful knowledge Should be publicly burnt, and all around Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books To the pyre, one banished poet One of the best, discovered, studying the list of the burnt To his horror, that his books Had been forgotten. He hurried to his desk On wings of rage and wrote a letter to the powers that be. Burn me! he wrote, his pen flying, burn me! Don’t do this to me! Don’t pass me over! Have I not always told The truth in my books? And now I am treated by you as a liar! I order you: Burn me! (C. 1941)
Anthony Holden (Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them)
How does a tiny heart harbor so many clashing sentiments? One moment it is devoted. The next, purely disdaining. Weeping at tremendous heartache and then laughing, lighthearted, through the same tears. How can a heart rage so fierce as to boil blood while it turns to ice? How is this done? To love, hate, esteem, deride, rejoice, deplore, favor, resent— all of these and more swirling inside. This sensitive heart, so full and resilient, buoys up to the point of bursting and then deflates on a dime. It is a slave to whims and whispers. How is it that the human heart beats so wild and untamed?
Richelle E. Goodrich (A Heart Made of Tissue Paper)
How to Resist march curse fume cry but save some of your salt to cure the rage so it lasts even longer write a poem write a check take a social media break take a long bath put lotion on your body then put your body in the street don’t waste your words on frauds be strategically silent or find the spaces of denial and shatter the silence with your screams close your ears to the lies but listen to the cries of the weak and the wounded keep the truth deep inside safe from the filthy fingers that warp everything they touch let it throb ache and break over and over again but don’t harden your heart harden your resolve instead most of all feel something feel something feel something
Zetta Elliott (Say Her Name)
Emotion is the trace of an activated archetypal pattern. Emotion is the repository of the archaic landscape within each individual. Emotion is the labile, volatile, energetic force linking chaos and order in the psyche. Riding on emotion, a person can go back in time and visit a primordial landscape, untouched by cultural influences. Transported by emotion we make all the stops along the full continuum of our psychological vista. At one end of the continuum we are best by overwhelming primitive rage or terror or longing. At the other end, we experience a calm peace or the satisfaction of everyday accomplishment. The palpable difference in each of these locations is the quality of the emotion.
Betty De Shong Meador (Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna)
We have to actively seek out this cosmic sympathy. There’s the famous Blake poem that opens with “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.” That’s what we’re after here. That’s the transcendental experience that makes our petty ego impossible. Feel unprotected against the elements or forces or surroundings. Remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you. Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, and end your conscious separation from the world. Reconcile yourself a bit better with the realities of life. Realize how much came before you, and how only wisps of it remain.
Ryan Holiday (Ego Is the Enemy)
The guide–book warmly recommends the seashore when the wind is in the east (which it was) as the quickest and firmest route from Göhren to Thiessow; but I chose rather to take the road over the plain because there was a poem in the guide–book about the way along the shore, and the guide–book said it described it extremely well, and I was sure that if that were so I would do better to go the other way. This is the poem — the translation is exact, the original being unrhymed, and the punctuation is the poet’s — Splashing waves Rocking boat Dipping gulls — Dunes. Raging winds Floating froth. Flashing lightning Moon! Fearful hearts Morning grey — Stormy nights Faith! I read it, marvelled, and went the other way.
Elizabeth von Arnim (The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen)
Censorship diminished, and copyright was originated. Moreover, the early years of the eighteenth century gave rise to a galaxy of new phenomena that included the printed handbill, printed receipts, printed tickets, printed advertisements, and posters. At the same time there was a surge in the production of political pamphlets, broadsides, books for children, and even street maps. Alexander Pope satirized the rage for print in his poem The Dunciad (1728–43); he mockingly suggested that its democratizing power had brought ‘the Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings’. Johnson echoed Pope’s sentiments, complaining that ‘so widely is spread the itch of literary praise, that almost every man is an author, either in act or in purpose’.3
Henry Hitchings (Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary)
The Dying Man" in memoriam W.B. Yeats 1. His words I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, “My soul’s hung out to dry, Like a fresh salted skin; I doubt I’ll use it again. “What’s done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose I know, as the dying know Eternity is Now. “A man sees, as he dies, Death’s possibilities; My heart sways with the world. I am that final thing, A man learning to sing. 2. What Now? Caught in the dying light, I thought myself reborn. My hand turn into hooves. I wear the leaden weight Of what I did not do. Places great with their dead, The mire, the sodden wood, Remind me to stay alive. I am the clumsy man The instant ages on. I burned the flesh away, In love, in lively May. I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs. In the worst night of my will, I dared to question all, And would the same again. What’s beating at the gate? Who’s come can wait. 3. The Wall A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn! The figure at my back is not my friend; The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn. I found my father when I did my work, Only to lose myself in this small dark. Though it reject dry borders of the seen, What sensual eye can keep and image pure, Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn? A slow growth is a hard thing to endure. When figures our of obscure shadow rave, All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave. The wall has entered: I must love the wall, A madman staring at perpetual night, A spirit raging at the visible. I breathe alone until my dark is bright. Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun. 4. The Exulting Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child– I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after image of the inner eye. Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone; I die into this life, alone yet not alone. Was it a god his suffering renewed?– I saw my father shrinking in his skin; He turned his face: there was another man, Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid. He quivered like a bird in birdless air, Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere. Fish feed on fish, according to their need: My enemies renew me, and my blood Beats slower in my careless solitude. I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed. I think a bird, and it begins to fly. By dying daily, I have come to be. All exultation is a dangerous thing. I see you, love, I see you in a dream; I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum, And that slow humming rises into song. A breath is but a breath: I have the earth; I shall undo all dying with my death. 5. They Sing, They Sing All women loved dance in a dying light– The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon! Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one, Then settles back to shade and the long night. A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn, And that cry takes me back where I was born. Who thought love but a motion in the mind? Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing? I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing; Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend. I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds, They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds. I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone: What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!– Eternity defined, and strewn with straw, The fury of the slug beneath the stone. The vision moves, and yet remains the same. In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am. The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
Theodore Roethke (The Collected Poems)
Over a span of twenty years, Shakespeare churned out an impressively whopping thirty-eight plays, 154 love sonnets, and two epic narrative poems. While most people associate him with his plays, it was his sonnets that likely earned him admiration among his contemporaries. Yes, that’s right: In his lifetime, Shakespeare garnered more acclaim for his sonnets than he did for his plays. In England during the 1590s, writing plays was considered a bit hackish—a way to pay the bills—and not an intellectual pursuit. Writing sonnets was all the rage— and a way to gain literary prestige. These poems weren’t published for the plebeian public, but were written down and shared among the literati—and aristocrats looking for some intellectual cachet by becoming patrons to brilliant but perhaps financially strapped writers. So, while Shakespeare likely wrote nearly all of his love sonnets in the early to mid 1590s, they weren’t officially collected and published until 1609, well after the fad had passed. W. H. Auden said of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “They are the work of someone whose ear is unerring.” In today’s less poetry-friendly world, appreciation of these sonnets tends, sadly, to be relegated to classrooms, Valentine’s Day, and anniversaries. Which is too bad, because—though they do indeed rhyme—they are far superior to the ditties found in ninety-nine-cent greeting cards. In fact, they cover the whole gamut of love—the good, the bad, the erotic, and the ugly, including love triangles, being dumped, and jealousy. There is also speculation as to how autobiographical the sonnets are. The truth is that we know so little about Shakespeare’s private life.
William Shakespeare (Love Sonnets of Shakespeare (RP Minis))
There have been times love has made my human Instincts into animal ones. Once in a dark lit bar, my love said my poems were shit And I, in the light of the candles, Pushed a sword into myself and fell over a cliff Into a neverending ocean. Once a man 5 years my younger Loved me and then gave me up. I raged around him like a bear. I once cheated on a new boyfriend with an old boyfriend. I cheated on an old boyfriend with a new one. Love has the ability to make the world kind, The specifics of one man always blends into another And turns back into my mother’s kisses on my cheek. It is I who loves, but it is in turn The world that loves me back. The world loves And I love back, the specifics of it Once in tune. Once we kissed and I was Mesmerized by the blondness of his cheek With the light on it and the sweet smell of the earth. But still the light on the cheek is the desert lizards Who will eat us in the afterworld and in the light of the moon Ther is the exhaust of love falling over everything
Dorothea Lasky
God help us you full of talk of a city called Edinburgh and me in silence so very deep we were so very much in love. And the burns and sikes and streams though shallow were deep music to us. You trout-tickler, you flower-picker, climber in willow trees, me laughing below as best I could laugh, though you never thought it ugly. Indeed the word you used was the word beautiful, pinning cowslips behind my ears, you patting and running fingers through our beckwashed hair. Lying by the marigold beds bare toes entwined, then dancing under branches before the elms ever died. But our mutual hearts never did. Bar it is 7 and your raining rage must cease under my morning moon. In my dawn shawl looking dawndown upon you in your foot-striding fellhighhighupuptopheavyrainbeatingrainrain. We have always walked together so long. In the long grass we walked and walked forever so long so very language long and I could say so once you had the slate in my lap. My tongue blank - FOREVER, word we wrote on a slate, remember when you taught me? - only my hands and eyes moving now - two daughters we could have had - but I am looking kindly and lovingly on you 'Please do it' - cool your raging fire lovelorn heart - for me. And love me - forever.
Barry MacSweeney (Pearl in the Silver Morning)
MY FATHER If I have to write a poem about my father it has to be about integrity and kindness — the selfless kind of kindness that is so very rare I am sure there will be many people living somewhere who must be as kind as him but what I mean to say is I have not met one yet and when it comes to helping others he always helps too much and as the saying goes — help someone, you earn a friend. help someone too much, you make an enemy. — so you know the gist of what I’m trying to say here anyways I was talking about the poem about my father it has to be about passion and hard work because you see you cannot separate these things from him they are part of him as his two eyes and two hands and his heart and his soul and his whole being and you cannot separate wind and waves or living and the universe or earth and heavens and although he never got any award from bureaucracy the students he taught ages ago still touch his feet and some of them are the people you have to make an appointment to meet even if it is for two minutes of their time and that’s a reward for him bigger than any other that some of his colleagues got for their flattery and also I have to write about reliability as well because you see as the sun always rises and the snowflakes are always six-folds and the spring always comes and the petals of a sunflower and every flower follows the golden ratio of symmetry my father never fails to keep his promise I have to mention the rage as well that he always carries inside him like a burning fire for wrongdoings for injustice and now he carries a bitterness too for people who used him good and discarded as it always happens with every good man in our world of humans and you must be thinking he has learned his lessons well you go to him — it does not matter who you are if he knows you or you are a stranger from other side of the world — and ask for his help he will be happy to do so as you must know people never change not their soul in any case.
Neena H Brar
The Poetry that Searches Poetry that paints a portrait in words, Poetry that spills the bottled emotions, Gives life to the feelings deep inside, Breaks through all the times wept, To sweep you in a whirling ecstatic delight. The chiseled marble of language, The paint spattered canvas, Where colors flow through words, Where emotions roll on a canvas, And it all begins with you. The canvas that portrays the trembling you, Through the feelings that splash, Through the words that spatter, All over the awaiting canvas. Such is the painting sketched with passion, Colored with the heart's unleashed emotions. The poetry that reads your trembling heart, The poetry that feeds the seed of your dreams, That poetry that reveals light within rain, Takes you to a place where beauty lies in stain. The poetry that whispers- "May you find the stars, in a night so dark, May you find the moon, so rich with silver, May you sip the madness and delight In a night berserk with a wailing agony". Such words that arise from spilling emotions, So recklessly you fall, in love with life again. So, you rise shedding your fears, To chase after your dreams, As you hear thunder in the rain, That carries your pain, Through the painting of words, colored with courage, Splashed with ferocity, amidst the lost battles. Such is the richest color splash in words, Laid down on papers, that stayed so empty, For ages and ages. At times, you may feel lost, Wandering homeless in the woods, But poetry that you write, To drink the moonlight and madness, Poetry that you spill on a canvas with words, Calls you to fall, for life again. The words that evoke the intense emotions, The painting that gives the richest revelation, The insight that deepens in a light so streaming, Is the poetry that reveals the truth and beauty, In a form so elemental, in a way so searching, For a beauty so emotive, Which trembles, With the poetry's deepest digging. The words that take your eyes to sleep, The poetry that stills your raging feelings, Is the portrait of words that carries you, In emotions bottled within, held so deep, For an era so long. Forgotten they seemed, yet they arose, With the word's deepest calling, To the soul sleeping inside. The poetry that traces your emotions with words, Is a poetry that traces your soul with its lips, To speak a language that your heart understands. The Ecstatic Dance of Soul Copyright 2020 Jayita Bhattacharjee
Jayita Bhattacharjee
O God of heaven! The dream of horror, The frightful dream is over now; The sickened heart, the blasting sorrow, The ghastly night, the ghastlier morrow, The aching sense of utter woe. The burning tears that would keep welling, The groan that mocked at every tear, That burst from out their dreary dwelling, As if each gasp were life expelling, But life was nourished by despair. The tossing and the anguished pining, The grinding teeth and starting eye; The agony of still repining, When not a spark of hope was shining From gloomy fate's relentless sky. The impatient rage, the useless shrinking From thoughts that yet could not be borne; The soul that was for ever thinking, Till nature maddened, tortured, sinking, At last refused to mourn. It's over now—and I am free, And the ocean wind is caressing me, The wild wind from the wavy main I never thought to see again. Bless thee, bright Sea, and glorious dome, And my own world, my spirit's home; Bless thee, bless all—I cannot speak; My voice is choked, but not with grief, And salt drops from my haggard cheek Descend like rain upon the heath. How long they've wet a dungeon floor, Falling on flagstones damp and grey: I used to weep even in my sleep; The night was dreadful like the day. I used to weep when winter's snow Whirled through the grating stormily; But then it was a calmer woe, For everything was drear to me. The bitterest time, the worst of all, Was that in which the summer sheen Cast a green lustre on the wall That told of fields of lovelier green. Often I've sat down on the ground, Gazing up to the flush scarce seen, Till, heedless of the darkness round, My soul has sought a land serene. It sought the arch of heaven divine, The pure blue heaven with clouds of gold; It sought thy father's home and mine As I remembered it of old. Oh, even now too horribly Come back the feelings that would swell, When with my face hid on my knee, I strove the bursting groans to quell. I flung myself upon the stone; I howled, and tore my tangled hair; And then, when the first gust had flown, Lay in unspeakable despair. Sometimes a curse, sometimes a prayer, Would quiver on my parchèd tongue; But both without a murmur there Died in the breast from whence they sprung. And so the day would fade on high, And darkness quench that lonely beam, And slumber mould my misery Into some strange and spectral dream, Whose phantom horrors made me know The worst extent of human woe. But this is past, and why return O'er such a path to brood and mourn? Shake off the fetters, break the chain, And live and love and smile again. The waste of youth, the waste of years, Departed in that dungeon thrall; The gnawing grief, the hopeless tears, Forget them—oh, forget them all!
Emily Jane Bronte (The Bronte Sisters: Selected Poems (Fyfield Books))
Rage is properly the title of Homer's poem, and his audience may have known it by that name, not Iliad.
Jonathan Shay (Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character)
Poem (I Can’t Speak for the Wind) I don’t know about the cold. I am sad without hands. I can’t speak for the wind Which chips away at me. When pulling a potato, I see only the blue haze. When riding an escalator, I expect something orthopedic to happen. Sinking in quicksand, I’m a wild appaloosa. I fly into a rage at the sight of a double-decker bus, I want to eat my way through the Congo, I’m a double agent who tortures himself and still will not speak. I don’t know about the cold, But I know what I like I like tropical madness, I like to shake the coconuts And fingerprint the pythons,- fevers which make the children dance. I am sad without hands, I’m very sad without sleeves or pockets. Winter is coming to this city, I can’t speak for the wind which chips away at me.
James Tate (Viper jazz (The Wesleyan poetry program ; v. 82))
a heart's spurt of rage.
Sharon Olds (Stag's Leap: Poems)
As a result there are many descriptions, mainly hostile, of the furious Marx in action. Bauer’s brother even wrote a poem about him: ‘Dark fellow from Trier in fury raging, / His evil fist is clenched, he roars interminably, / As though ten thousand devils had him by the hair.
Paul Johnson (Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity)
These little irises could be your eyes’ if they were twice as large and twice as dark, but if I got inside them–can I find the vein that is the tunnel to your heart? I may be in there: I see signs of movement under the silky shadow/luminescence; is it feeling’s fierce integument or a more troubled, more elusive essence? Your other eyes have locked me out sometimes (they have good reason to) but not ignored the guilty pleading boring out from mine there are no words for, as there are no words for what these lacquer seeds say. Irritation brought them on, but patience made them pearls, the same slow labor that piles years of pages up– call it obsession, plodding, imitation, pigheadedness, simplicity, devotion: Out of the dented life burled nacre curls until the final jewel locks rays and rages up. Remember when you wear these little worlds.
Jonathan Galassi (Nearsights: Selected Poems of Valerio Magrelli (English, Italian and Italian Edition))
Like the rose I am laughing with all my body, not only with my mouth, because I am without myself, alone with the king of the world. You who came with torch and at dawn ravished my heart, dispatch my soul after my heart, do not seize my heart alone. Do not in rage and envy make my soul a stranger to my heart; do not leave the former here, and do not summon the latter alone. Send a royal message, issue a general invitation; how long, O sultan, shall the one be with you and the other alone? If you do not come tonight as yesterday and close my lips, I will make a hundred uproars, my soul, I will not lament alone.
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi) (Mystical Poems of Rumi)