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Informationen zum Autor Edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine Klappentext Uniquely comprehensive...highly readable...the definitive collection of classic lyric poetry. From Shakespeare's wise music to Marvell's profundity and wit...from the Romantics' passionate view of man and woman and nature to twentieth-centur poets' confused searching, this outstanding one-volume collection brings us the profound, soul-nourishing experience of great poetry. Brilliantly selected and arranged by renowned literary masters Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, the poems here reflect the genius of six centuries of poets. It is the finest anthology of lyric poetry ever published. "Truth" by Geoffrey Chaucer "Ophelia's Song" by William Shakespeare "The Canonization" by John Donne "To Heaven" by Ben Jonson "Ode on Solitude" by Alexander Pope "The Tyger" by William Blake "The Solitary Reaper" by William Wordsworth "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats and more than ninety additional classic poems. Leseprobe GEOFFREY CHAUCER/1340?-1400 Merciles Beautè Your yën two wol slee me sodenly, I may the beautè of hem not sustene, So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene. And but your word wol helen hastily My hertes wounde, whyl that hit is grene, Your yën two wol slee me sodenly, I may the beautè of hem not sustene. Upon my trouthe I sey yow feithfully That ye ben of my lyf and deeth the quene; For with my deeth the trouthe shal be sene. Your yën two wol slee me sodenly, I may the beautè of hem not sustene. So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene. JOHN DONNE/1573-1631 The Canonization For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honour, or his grace, Or the king's real, or his stampèd face. Contemplate, what you will approve, So you will let me love. Alas, alas, who's injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? Who says my tears have overflowed his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill Add one more to the plaguey bill? Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still Litigious men, which quarrels move, Though she and I do love. Call us what you will, we are made such by love; Call her one, me another fly, We are tapers too, and at our own cost die, And we in us find the eagle and the dove. The phoenix riddle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it. So to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, And by these hymns, all shall approve Us canonized for love; And thus invoke us; you whom reverend love Made one another's hermitage; You to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize), Countries, towns, courts: beg from above A pattern of your love! JONATHAN SWIFT/1667-1745 A City Shower In Imitation of Virgil's Georgics Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower. While rain depends, the pensive cat gi...
