Fragments of poems

My delight and Thy Delight fragment by Robert Bridges

My delight and thy delight

Walking, like two angels white,

In the gardens of the night

Spirits fragment by Robert Bridges (before 1890)

Angel spirits of sleep,

White-robed, with silver hair,

In your meadows fair,

Where the willows weep,

And the sad moonbeam

On the gilding stream

Writes her scatter’d dream

Poem fragment by Robert Bridges (before 1890)

My bed and pillow are cold,

My heart is faint with dread,

The air hath an odour of mould,

I dream I lie with the dead

Astronomy fragment by Iolo Aneurin Williams (from New Poems 1920?)

Jupiter may be this or that

Of stars that shine in heaven

Neptune a mere hypothesis

And Saturn one of seven

In The Fire fragment by Maurice Hewlett (1920?)

The fire burns low

Now the dying embers

Twinkle and glow

Like village lights

Seen from the heights

In dark Decembers

Trees and Horses by Alice Corbin 1920 (not a fragment)

Trees stand motionless among themselves;

Some are solitary.

Horses wander over wide pastures;

At night they herd closely,

Rumps hunched to the wind.

The Title of Poet fragment by Robert Graves

Poets are guardians

Of a shadowy island

With granges and forests

Warmed by the Moon.

Head and Heart by Collin Ellis

I put my hand upon my heart

And swore that we should never part –

I wonder what I should have said

If I had put it on my head.

Fragment by anonymous or by Harriet Comstock, from The Shield of Silence (1921, a word changed by me)

I’ll climb the frosty mountain,

And there I’ll tame the weather,

I’ll tear the rainbow

From the sky

And tie both ends together.

(Comstock’s version says, “there I’ll coin the weather”.)

On the little God, by Hilaire Belloc (an anti-Semite! 1922)

Of all the gods that gave me all their glories

Today their deigns to walk with me but one.

I lead him by the hand and tell him stories.

It is the Queen of Cyprus’ son.

Woman’s Song fragment by Edward Shanks (1922)

No more against my bosom press thee,

Seek no more that my hands caress thee,

Leave the sad lips thou hast known so well;

If to my heart thou lean thine ear

There grieving thou shalt only hear

Vain murmuring of an empty shell.

Awake at Night fragment by Owen Barfield (1923)

Far are the voices now, and far

The faces of my friends at noon—

The shoreless night, the flaming star,

The dead rock-wrinkles on the moon!

Fragment by Kreyborg (1920s?)

The sky

Is that beautiful old parchment

In which the sun

And the moon

Keep their diary

Fragment from A Light Song, by Robert Roe (November 1925)

The sun is a gas balloon

That goes hobbledehoy,

And all of the stars that I see

Are dreams of a boy.

Fragment from Sunday in November by Helen Gilbert (November 1925)

Sunday in November—

With snow on the ground,

And the wind running backwards

With a long frightened sound;

Fragment by Herbert Read

His limbs

Dangle

Like marionettes

Over

a

mauve

Sea

Fragment, quoted by Edith Sitwell 1959

Is it, when paper roses make us sneeze,

A mental or a physical event?

Fragment, from Allen Ginsberg

What sphinx of cement and aluminium,

bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains

and imagination?

ß