/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1961768]

From "Night" by William Blake-

The sun descending in the west.
the evening star does shine.
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine.
The moon like a flower,
In high heaven's bower;
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.

[Anonymous No.1961789]

This reminds me that it's bedtime.

[Anonymous No.1961797]

More poems about night time /lit/? Surely you have some poems memorized.

[CameronJerome !4JRO42v1KU No.1961801]

The only poem I have memorised is sonnet 18

feelsentrylevelman

[Anonymous No.1961802]

Sort of about night. Not really. But sort of.


Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold


The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

[Anonymous No.1961816]

>>1961802
I haven't read that in a long time but it is beautiful. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.1961831]

This is kind of about night... or just before night I suppose. Dusk?

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and if you have to ask the author I will punch you straight in the face.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

[Anonymous No.1961845]

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Stephen Crane 1899

[Anonymous No.1961846]

I don't want to type out all 50 lines here, but John Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed" is a pretty good night-time poem I think ;)
"To teach thee, I am naked first; why then/ What need'st thou have more covering than a man?"

lol

[Anonymous No.1961864]

>>1961801
It's ok. Just read more so you avoid further embarrassment!
Uh... well my contribution isn't technically a poem but it's from a Shakespeare play... The Merchant of Venice to be exact. Act 5, Scene 1 to be even more exact.

"The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in a such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay that night.

[Anonymous No.1961876]

TWO FIGURES IN DENSE VIOLET NIGHT
by Wallace Stevens

I had as lief be embraced by the portier of the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.
Use dasky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,
And out of the droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
and sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Beyond Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in the total blue.
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.

[Anonymous No.1961901]

The ending of "Thanatopsis" By W. C. Bryant

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

[Anonymous No.1961922]

I can't believe nobody's shared the obvious Poe poem having to do with night yet...

Well, here's "Evening Star" By Edgar Allen Poe

'Twas noontide of summer
And midtime of night,
And stars, in their orbits,
Shone pale, through the light
Of the brighter, cold moon
'Mid the planets her slaves,
Herself in the Heavens,
Her beam on the waves.

I gazed awhile
On her cold smile,
Too cold- too cold for me;
There passed, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,
In thy glory afar
And dearer they beam shall be;
For joy to my heart
Is the proud part
Thou bearest in Heaven at night,
And more I admire
Thy distant fire,
Than that colder, lowly light.

[Anonymous No.1961945]

MOAR POEMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I fukin love poems

[Anonymous No.1961983]

bump for more poems.

[Anonymous No.1962025]

‘Oh! Ye immortal gods!
What is theogony?
Oh! Thou too, mortal man!
What is philosophy?
Oh! World which was and is, what is cosmogony?
Some people have accused me of
Misanthropy;
And yet I know no more than the mahogany
That forms this desk, of what they mean;-lycanthropy
I comprehend, for without transformation
Men become wolves on the slightest occasion’

[Anonymous No.1962029]

‘so, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em;
And so on ad infinitum
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind’

[Anonymous No.1962055]

The curfew tolls the knell of parting today,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Elegy_Written_in_a_Country_Churchyard

[Anonymous No.1962062]

‘A tooter who tutored the flute
Once tutored two tooters to toot
Said the two to the tutor
Is it harder to toot or
To tutor two tooters to toot?’

[Sherlock Holmes Guy No.1962075]

Should the wide world roll away,
Leaving black terror,
Limitless night,
Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential,
If thou and thy white arms were there,
And the fall to doom a long way.

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines, 1895

[Sherlock Holmes Guy No.1962092]

The Abandoned Valley

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
So you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

Jack Gilbert

[Sherlock Holmes Guy No.1962129]

Un patio

Con la tarde
se cansaron los dos o tres colores del patio.
Esta noche, la luna, el claro círculo,
no domina su espacio.
Patio, cielo encauzado.
El patio es el declive
por el cual se derrama el cielo en la casa.
Serena,
la eternidad espera en la encrucijada de estrellas.
Grato es vivir en la amistad oscura
de un zaguán, de una parra y de un aljibe.

Jorge Luis Borges

---

A Patio

With evening
the two or three colors of the patio grow weary.
Tonight, the moon, the bright circle
does not dominate her space.
Patio, heavenly watercourse.
The patio is the slope
down which the sky flows into the house.
Serenely,
eternity waits at the crossroads of the stars.
It is lovely to live in the dark friendship
of an archway, a vine, and a well.

[Sherlock Holmes Guy No.1962157]

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

William Stafford

[Sherlock Holmes Guy No.1962167]

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

T. S. Eliot

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.1962195]

"The South"

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars,
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations,
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern,
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
–these things perhaps are the poem.

Jorge Luis Borges

[Pointman !!+QAUf+RigRX No.1962213]

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

- Robert Frost

[Anonymous No.1962255]

>>1962213
love Robbo

The earthen lot
Alistair Harrison

Sands, caravans, and teetering sea-edge graves.

The seaward sides for those of lowly status.
Not only gales gnaw at their names, the waves
Jostle the skulls and bones from their quietus.

The church is a solid bulwark for their betters
Against the scouring sea-salt that erodes
These chiselled sandstone formal Roman letters
To flowing calligraphic Persian odes
Singing of sherbet, sex in Samarkand,
With Hafiz at the hammams and harems,
O anywhere but bleak Northumberland
With responsibilities for others’ dreams!

Not for the bard of the tamarinds
Where wine is always cool, and kusi hot-

His line from Omar scrivened in this wind’s:

Some could articulate, while others not