Poetry in Motion

[BRADYKININ]

If
by Rudyard Kipling. Versioni ne anglisht.

If you can keep your head when all about you
-----Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
-----But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
-----Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
-----And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
-----If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
-----And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
-----Twisted by knaves to make a t rap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
-----And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
-----And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
-----And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
-----To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
-----Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
-----Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
-----If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
-----With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
-----And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!

[BRADYKININ]

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
by Sir Walter Raleigh

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten—
In folly ripe, in season rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

[BRADYKININ]

from Gitanjali
by Rabindranath Tagore

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 lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my God, let my country awake.

[BRADYKININ]

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices? :(

[BRADYKININ]

[l(a] by E. e. cummings

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

p.s. This silly-looking piece, which is one of the best examples of concrete, or shaped, poetry, reads, "Loneliness . . . a leaf falls." . . . or better yet, "L(a leaf falls)onliness."