Life

I made a posy, while the day ran by;
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.

But time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart:
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Time’s gentle admonition :

Who did so sweetly death’s sad taste convey,
Making my mind to smell my fatal day;
Yet sug’ring the suspicion.

Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.

I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my scent be good, I care not, if
It be as short as yours.

Petra

It seems no work of Man's creative hand

by labor wrought as wavering fancy planned

But from the rock as if by magic grown

eternal, silent, beautiful, alone

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine

where erst Athena held her rites divine

Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane

that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain

But rose-red as if the blush of dawn

that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn

The hues of youth upon a brow of woe

which Man deemed old two thousand years ago

match me such marvel save in Eastern clime

a rose-red city half as old as time

It Felt Love

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being,

Otherwise,

We all remain

Too

Frightened.

-Hafiz, c. 1320 to 1389, a beautiful, mystic, Sufi poet from Persia

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

A Dream

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed-
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream- that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro' storm and night,
So trembled from afar-
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day-star?

The Year's at the Spring

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven—
All's right with the world!

Note: The poem appears in Part I of the play Pippa Passes. 

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Note: Invictus is Latin for Unconquered. Nelson Mandela was inspired by this poem, and had written it on a scrap of paper in his prison cell while he was incarcerated for 27 years on Robben Island.