Friday is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi. This crude poem–sometimes described as a piece of rhyming prose– is written in Umbrian, an Italian dialect distinct from but not too different from the Florentine Tuscan that Dante made the language of Italian literature
Some of my own childhood favorites from A Child’s Garden of Verses, plus a modernist poem possibly inspired by Stevenson.
These poems of Henry Timrod, the finest poet of the War Between the States, are posted courtesy of Vince Cornell:
How blithe each morn was I tae see
My lass come o’er the hill.
She tripped the burn and ran tae me.
I met her wi good will.
This is a brief section of Edward Fitzgerald’s famous rendering of the Rubaiyat by the Persian mathematician Omar Khayam VII Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing. VIII Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. IX Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose...
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl’s trisyllable.
“Much may be said on both sides.”–Hark! I hear
A well known voice that murmurs in my ear,–
The voice of Candour.–Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which softens party’s headlong rage.
Full well I know – my friends – ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead –
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy –
There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
