GREAT LINES FROM GREAT POEMS (PART FIVE)

 

                GREAT LINES FROM GREAT POEMS

                                                          (PART FIVE)

1.     Rise! for the day is passing,

And you lie dreaming on;

The others have buckled their armor,

And forth to the fight are gone:

A place in the ranks awaits you,

Each man has some part to play;

The Past and Future are nothing,

In the face of the stern today.-----A. A. Procter.

 

2.     They are slaves who fear to speak,

For the fallen and the weak;

They are slaves who will not choose,

Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,

Rather than in silence  shrink,

From the truth they needs must think;

They are slaves who dare not be,

In the right with two or three.….. James Russell Lowell.

 

3.     Ah, love, let us be true

To one another ! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.-----Matthew Arnold.

 

4.     A book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of wine, a Loaf of Bread----and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness----

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!----Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam,                                                                                     Translated by Edward Fitzgerald.  

5.     I think I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.----Joyce Kilmer

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 Compiler: G. R. Kanwal

21^st October 2025