English Poetry

Broken Images by Robert Graves

He is quick, thinking in clear images;

I am slow, thinking in broken images. 

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;

I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images. 

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;

Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance. 

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;

Questioning their relevance, I question the fact. 

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;

When the fact fails me, I approve my senses. 

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;

I continue slow and sharp in my broken images. 

He in a new confusion of his understanding;

I in a new understanding of my confusion. 

                     Robert Graves

If ever two were one, then surely we.

by Anne Bradstreet

If ever wife was happy in a man,

If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee;

I prize thy love more then whole Mines of gold,

Compare with me ye women if you can.

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

Nor ought but love from thee, give recompence.

My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,

Thy love is such I can no way repay,

The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

sindhi woman by jon stallworthy, English Poetry 

Barefoot through the bazaar,

and with the same undulant grace

as the cloth blown back from her face,

she glides with a stone jar

high on her head

and not a ripple in her tread.

Watching her cross erect

stones, garbage, excrement, and crumbs

of glass in the Karachi slums,

I, with my stoop, reflect

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

                            Jon Stallworthy 

Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

Sonnet 116, One of the world's most readable sonnet in weddings by William Shakespeare. Its a piece of art, undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, Sonnet 116 provides a quintessential definition of love. Love, according to this sonnet, does not change or fade; it has no flaws and even outlasts death. The sonnet appeared in Emma Thompson’s screenplay for the film of Sense and Sensibility, and is memorably quoted by Kate Winslet, who played romantic Marianne.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Which alters when it alteration finds,

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

It is the star to every wandering bark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Ozymandias Poem by 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.'