User:Trimalchio/coursepack

The Ruin
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed. Still the masonry endures in winds cut down persisted on__________________ fiercely sharpened________ _________ ______________ she shone_________ _____________g skill ancient work_________ _____________g of crusts of mud turned away spirit mo________yne put together keen-counselled a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound the wall with wire brace wondrously together. Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls, high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude, many a meadhall full of festivity, until Fate the mighty changed that. Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away; their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed. The rebuilders perished, the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior, joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour, proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings; looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones, at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery, at this bright castle of a broad kingdom. The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat in wide surge; the wall enclosed all in its bright bosom, where the baths were, hot in the heart. That was convenient. Then they let pour_______________ hot streams over grey stone. un___________ _____________ until the ringed sea (circular pool?) hot _____________where the baths were. Then is_______________________ __________re, that is a noble thing, to the house__________ castle_______
 * Sonnet
 * Edmund Spenser
 * Ovid
 * William Morris
 * Sylvia Plath

Ennui SYLVIA PLATH
written as an undergraduate Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe, designing futures where nothing will occur: cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she will still predict no perils left to conquer. Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard of, while blasé princesses indict tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump, compelling hero’s dull career to crisis; and when insouciant angels play God’s trump, while bored arena crowds for once look eager, hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
 * Dylan Thomas
 * Oscar Wilde
 * 
 * Philip Sidney
 * Walter Raleigh

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
by Raleigh in reply to Marlowe 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 reason 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.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Marlowe
Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses, And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers and a kirtle Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle: A gown made of the finest wool, Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold: A belt of straw and ivy buds, With coral clasps and amber studs; And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me and be my love. The shepherd swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning; If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my love.


 * John Donne

Holy Sonnet 7
At the round earth's imagined corners blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go; All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow, All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe. But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space; For, if above all these my sins abound, 'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace, When we are there. Here on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent, for that's as good As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.


 * Philip Larkin
 * Arthur Rimbaud
 * William Butler Yeats
 * John Keats
 * Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias by Horace Smith
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows: "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone, "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows "The wonders of my hand." The City's gone, Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. —Horace Smith.

Ozymandias by Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.


 * John Milton

On His Blindness
by Milton, gives a sense of the Italian form:

 When I consider how my light is spent (a) Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, (b) And that one talent which is death to hide, (b) Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent (a) To serve therewith my Maker, and present (a) My true account, lest he returning chide; (b) "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?" (b) I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent (a) That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need (c) Either man's work or his own gifts; who best (d) Bear his mile yoke, they serve him best. His state (e) Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed (c) And post o'er land and ocean without rest; (d) They also serve who only stand and wait." (e)
 * John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
 * William Blake
 * Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson

American Poetry

 * Anne Bradstreet
 * Phillis Wheatley
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 * Edgar Allan Poe
 * Walt Whitman
 * Emily Dickinson
 * Robert Frost
 * Carl Sandburg
 * Wallace Stevens
 * Theodore Roethke
 * Lawrence Ferlinghetti
 * James Wright
 * Frank O'Hara
 * Andrei Codrescu

American Fiction

 * Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
 * Washington Irving
 * Nathaniel Hawthorne
 * Herman Melville
 * Samuel Langhorne Clemens
 * O. Henry
 * Edith Wharton
 * F. Scott Fitzgerald
 * Sherwood Anderson
 * Ernest Hemingway
 * J.D. Salinger
 * Ambrose Bierce