2 poems / Sara Teasdale

"I Thought of You"

I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
   And walking up the long beach all alone;
I heard the waves, breaking in measured thunder
   As you and I once heard their monotone.

Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
   The cold and sparkling silver of the sea —
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
   Before you hear that sound again with me.

"I Thought of You" read for Reader's Utopia.

On the Dunes

If there is any life when death is over,
   These tawny beaches will know much of me,
I shall come back, as constant and as changeful
   As the unchanging, many-colored sea.

If life was small, if it has made me scornful,
   Forgive me; I shall straighten like a flame
In the great calm of death, and if you want me
   Stand on the sea-ward dunes and call my name.

~~
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
from Flame and Shadow, 1920

[Poems are in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Sara Teasdale biography

"On the Dunes" read by Ghizela Rowe. Courtesy Ghizela Rowe - topic.

Beach Song / Pearl Andelson Sherry

Beach song

from From a Bay-window

What are they weaving under the water?
They make sheer laces and drag them down.
They ruffle a lawn with a great grieving.
What are they making — what manner of gown?

What are they weaving, caught here,    
Caught there, on the thin-washed blue?
Who is to be married or who is to be buried,
Under the water, under the water?

~~
Pearl Andelson Sherry (1899-1966)
from Poetry, December 1921

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Pearl Andelson Sherry biography

By the Sea / Christina Rossetti

By the Sea

Why does the sea moan evermore?
Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,
It frets against the boundary shore;
All earth's full rivers cannot fill
The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.

Sheer miracles of loveliness
Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:
Anemones, salt, passionless,
Blow flower-like; just enough alive
To blow and multiply and thrive.

Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,
Encrusted live things argus-eyed,
All fair alike, yet all unlike,
Are born without a pang, and die
Without a pang, and so pass by.

~~
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
from Poems, 1890

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Christina Rossetti biography

"By the Sea." Courtesy The Verse Place.

The Wind Sleepers / H.D.

The Wind Sleepers

Whiter
than the crust
left by the tide,
we are stung by the hurled sand
and the broken shells.

We no longer sleep
in the wind —
we awoke and fled
through the city gate.

Tear —
tear us an altar,
tug at the cliff-boulders,
pile them with the rough stones —
we no longer
sleep in the wind,
propitiate us.

Chant in a wail
that never halts,
pace a circle and pay tribute
with a song.

When the roar of a dropped wave
breaks into it,
pour meted words
of sea-hawks and gulls
and sea-birds that cry
discords.

~~
H.D. (1886-1961)
from Sea Garden, 1916

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

"The Wind Sleepers" read by Robyn O'Neil.

(Poem begins at 2:35)

H.D. biography

August / Dorothy Parker

August

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces' pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

~~
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
from Enough Rope, 1926

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Dorothy Parker biography

Break, Break, Break / Alfred Tennyson

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,
         On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
         The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
         That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
         That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
         To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
         And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break
         At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
         Will never come back to me.

~~
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), 1835
from Poems, 1842

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

"Break, Break, Break" read by Moses Shobet.

Alfred Tennyson biography

About "Break, Break, Break"

Penny's Top 20 / July 2019

Penny's Top 20
The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in July 2019:

  1.  7/16/69, George J. Dance
  2.  Esthetique du Mal, Wallace Stevens

  3.  Angel Standing in the Sun, AE Reiff

  4.  The Vast Hour, Genevieve Taggard
  5.  Poppies in July, Sylvia Plath
  6.  I Hear America Singing, Walt Whitman
  7.  'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight, Emily Brontë
  8.  Back Yard, Carl Sandburg
  9.  Canada, John Frushard Waddington
10.  Much in Little, Yvor Winters

11.  Full many a glorious morning have I seen, William Shakespeare
12.  I can remember, Stephan Pickering
13.  Lorelei's Song, Heinrich Heine
14.  Chaos in motion and Not in Motion, Wallace Stevens
15.  Penny; or, Penny's Hat, George J. Dance
16.  The Breezes of June, Paul Hamilton Hayne
17.  Winter on the Zuyder Zee, Radclyffe Hall
18.  Last Week in October, Thomas Hardy
19.  Vowels, Arthur Rimbaud
20.  The Reader, Wallace Stevens

Source: Blogger, "Stats"