Latest quotes | Random quotes | Latest comments | Submit quote

Katharine Lee Bates

Playmates

SUMMER fervors slacken;
Sumac torches dim;
There's bronze upon the bracken;
September has a whim
For carmine, pearl and amber
Touches on her green;
Busy squirrels clamber;
Restless birds convene.
Where Indian pipe still blanches,
Where hoary lichen flakes
Forest trunks and branches,
The golden foxglove makes
A mimic wood that tosses
Warning to the trees,
Then droops upon the mosses,
Heavy with bloom and bees.
What rumbelow of revel
Deep in those honey-jars!
A saffron moth, with level
And languid motion, stars

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

Our First Families

SWEET are the manners of the wood,
Our only old society,
Where all the folk are glad and good
In unrebuked variety.
Within this gentle commonweal
No envy falls with fairy gold
On jewel-weed and Solomon's seal,
Moth mullein and marsh marigold.
No rubied vines despise the lot
Of ragged neighbors; whether moss
Be flat or tufted matters not,
Pale peat or glittering feather-moss.
The common milkwort holds estates
And wears his purple royalty;
The bluets keep their ancient traits
With quiet Quaker loyalty.
These families of long descent,
Our tutors in amenities,
Have pedigrees of such extent
They well may share serenities.

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

When The Millennium Comes

WHEN the Millennium comes
Only the kings will fight,
While the princes beat the drums,
And the queens in aprons white,
Arnica bottle in hand,
Watch their Majesties throw,
With a gesture vague and grand,
Their crowns at the dodging foe,
Poor old obsolete crowns
That Time hangs up in a row.
When the Millennium comes
And the proud steel navies meet,
While the furious boiler hums,
And the vengeful pistons beat,
The sailors will stay on shore
And cheer with a polyglot shout
The self-fed cannon that roar
Till metal has fought it out,
But the warm, glad bodies of boys
Are not for the waves to flout.

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassion'd stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.

America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee Bates (1895)Report problemRelated quotes
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

A Mountain Storm

OUR blue sierras shone serene, sublime,
When ghostly shapes came crowding up the air,
Shadowing the landscape with some vast despair;
And all was changed as in weird pantomime,
Transfigured into vague, fantastic form
By that tremendous carnival of storm.
Pilgrim processions of bowed trees that climb
To sacred summits, in the clashing hail
Shuddered like flagellants beneath the flail.
Most gracious hills, in that tempestuous time,
Went wild as angered bulls, with bellowing cry
And goring horns that strove to charge the sky.
Masses of rock, long gnawed by stealthy rime,
With sudden roar that made our bravest blanch,
Came volleying down in fatal avalanche.
All nature seemed convulsed in some fierce crime,
And then a rainbow, and behold! the sun
Went comforting the harebells one by one;
And all was still save for the vesper chime
From far, faint belfry bathed in creamy light,

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

Matthew Arnold On hearing him read his Poems in Boston

A stranger, schooled to gentle arts,
He stept before the curious throng;
His path into our waiting hearts
Already paved by song.

Full well we knew his choristers,
Whose plaintive voices haunt our rest,
Those sable-vested harbingers
Of melancholy guest.

We smiled on him for love of these,
With eyes that swift grew dim to scan
Beneath the veil of courteous ease
The faith-forsaken man.

To his wan gaze the weary shows
And fashions of our vain estate,
Our shallow pain and false repose,
Our barren love and hate,

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

The Titanic

As she sped from dawn to gloaming, a palace upon the sea,
Did the waves from her proud bows foaming whisper what port should be?
That her maiden voyage was tending to a haven hushed and deep,
Where after the shock and the rending she should moor at the wharf of sleep?
Oh, her name shall be tale and token to all the ships that sail,
How her mighty heart was broken by blow of a crystal flail,
How in majesty still peerless her helpless head she bowed
And in light and music, fearless, plunged to her purple shroud.
Did gleams and dreams half-heeded, while the days so lightly ran,
Awaken the glory seeded from God in the soul of man?
For touched with a shining chrism, with love's fine grace imbued,
Men turned them to heroisim as it were but habitude.
O midnight strange and solemn, when the icebergs stood at gaze,
Death on one pallid column, to watch our human ways,
And saw throned Death defeated by a greater lord than he,
Immortal Life who greeted home-comers from the sea.

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

The Red Cross Nurse

ONE summer day, gleaming in memory,
We drove, my Joy and I,
Through fragrant hawthorn lanes
Gold-fringed with wisps of rye
Brushed off the harvest wains,
From that old, gladsome town of Shrewsbury,
Throned on twin hills and girdled by a loop
Of the brown Severn, out to Battlefield.
Henry the Fourth with his usurping sword
Smote here the haughty Percies,
And after builded here, as due to Him
Who made rebellion stoop
And lesser traitors to chief traitor yield,
A church. Decayed, restored,
Its centuries afford.
To stranger eyes, enshadowed by the view
Of that ridged burial plain from which it grew,
No sight more sacred than a crude
Image of visage dim,
Hewn by some ancient tool from forest wood,

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

In August

BESIDE the country road with truant grace
Wild carrot lifts its circles of white lace.
From vines whose interwoven branches drape
The old stone walls, come pungent scents of grape.
The sumach torches burn; the hardhack glows;
From off the pines a healing fragrance blows;
The pallid Indian pipe of ghostly kin
Listens in vain for stealthy moccasin.
In pensive mood a faded robin sings;
A butterfly with dusky, gold-flecked wings
Holds court for plumy dandelion seed
And thistledown, on throne of fireweed.
The road goes loitering on, till it hath missed
Its way in goldenrod, to keep a tryst,
Beyond the mosses and the ferns that veil
The last faint lines of its forgotten trail,
With Lonely Lake, so crystal clear that one
May see its bottom sparkling in the sun
With many-colored stones. The only stir
On its green banks is of the kingfisher

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share

Marching Feet

THESE August nights, hushed but for drowsy peep
Of fledglings, tremble with a strange vibration,
A sound too far for hearing, sullen, dire,
Shaking the earth.
Even within the swaying veils of sleep
We are haunted by a horror, a mistrust,
A muffled perturbation,
Vaguely aware
Of prodigies in birth,
Of brooding thunders unbelievable,
Fierce forces that conspire
Against mankind.
We start awake;
The purple glooms, all sweet
With dewy fragrance, bear
Our eyelids down, but still we feel the beat,
Dull, doomful, irretrievable,
Of Europe's marching feet,
Enchanted, blind,
By wizard music led

[...] Read more

poem by Katharine Lee BatesReport problemRelated quotes
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Share
 

<< < Page / 11 > >>

If you know another quote, please submit it.

Search


Recent searches | Top searches