Poetry and Storytelling by Kai
WORDS BY KAI. This site is the home of creative expression fueled by passion and inspired by the sparks of a my starlight muse. On these pages you will find my creative voice in lines of poetry, thoughtful essays and commentary, creative storytelling, and in an array of beautiful words to inspire the logophile in us all.
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- ORIGINAL POETRY [A -F] [G-M] [N-Z]
- THOUGHTS AND COMMENTARY - [Personal Narratives] [Informative Articles] [Social Commentary] [Book Excerpts]
- CREATIVE STORYTELLING
Learn new words with the Word of the Day and the topic Word Lists. Build your new vocabulary with new words, old words, obscure words and untranslatable words from faraway lands.
THOUGHTS AND COMMENTARY
Directory Informational Articles
Commentaries and essays on a variety of topics including parenting, the capacity for love, emotions, mindfulness and social issues.
CLASSIC & MODERN POETRY
AT A GLANCE - PART 2
SHAKESPEAREAN SONNETS
Shakespeare produced 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609. There are six additional sonnets included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
The sonnets are almost all constructed of three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet. Sonnets are fourteen-line lyric poems, traditionally written in iambic pentameter - lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" At the beginning of the third quatrain is a volta or a turn and this means the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a turn of thought.
The sonnet themes include the passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty and mortality. The first 126 are addressed to a young man and the last 28 are addressed to a woman.
See Also (External Links)
View Sonnet Directory
Full Text Sonnets
Sonnet 20
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
Sonnet 03
Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 126
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st;
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!
She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure:
Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
Sonnet L
How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel's end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
'Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!'
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide;
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind;
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
Sonnet XVIII
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet CXXXVIII
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.
Sonnet CLI
Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no father reason;
But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her 'love' for whose dear love I rise and fall.
FAMOUS LINES OF POETRY
From "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman:
"I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles."
From "Little Red Cap" by Carol Ann Duffy:
"Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head
Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood
But then I was young."
From "Variations on the Word Sleep" by Margaret Atwood:
"I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary."
From "The Starling" by Amy Lowell:
"I weary for desires never guessed,
For alien passions, strange imaginings,
To be some other person for a day."
From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot:
"For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons;
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
From "Life is Fine" by Langston Hughes:
"Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry-
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die."
From "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot:
"These fragments I have shored
Against my ruins."
From "the boys i mean are not refined" by e. e. cummings:
"they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance."
From "To Earthward" by Robert Frost:
"Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear
And once that seemed too much
I lived on air."
From "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden:
"He was my North, my South , my East and my West
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong."
From "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats:
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
From "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll:
"`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrab"
From "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
"Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."
From "Bright Star" by John Keats:
"Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death."
From "Of Mere Being" by Wallace Stevens:
"The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down."
From "Suicide's Note" by Langston Hughes:
"The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss."
From "Be Nobody's Darling" by Alice Walker:
"Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools."
From "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou:
"You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise."
From "Holy Sonnet X" by John Dunne:
"DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so."
From "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils."
From "A Question" by Robert Frost:
"A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth."
From "Apology" by William Carlos Williams:
"The beauty of
the terrible faces
of our nonentities
stirs me to it."
From "Sonnet 116" by William Shakespeare:
"Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shake."
From "Auguries of Innocence" by William Blake:
"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour."
From "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
"We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
From “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
From “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” William Butler Yeats
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
From “The Road Not Taken, ” Robert Frost
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the road less traveled by”
From: “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" W.B. Yeats
"I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
From Song: To Celia" Ben Jonson
"Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine."
From “You Are Jeff" Richard Siken
“but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name
Shakespeare produced 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609. There are six additional sonnets included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
The sonnets are almost all constructed of three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet. Sonnets are fourteen-line lyric poems, traditionally written in iambic pentameter - lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" At the beginning of the third quatrain is a volta or a turn and this means the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a turn of thought.
The sonnet themes include the passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty and mortality. The first 126 are addressed to a young man and the last 28 are addressed to a woman.
See Also (External Links)
View Sonnet Directory
Full Text Sonnets
Sonnet 20
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
Sonnet 03
Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 126
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st;
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!
She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure:
Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
Sonnet L
How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel's end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
'Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!'
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide;
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind;
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
Sonnet XVIII
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet CXXXVIII
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.
Sonnet CLI
Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no father reason;
But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her 'love' for whose dear love I rise and fall.
FAMOUS LINES OF POETRY
From "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman:
"I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles."
From "Little Red Cap" by Carol Ann Duffy:
"Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head
Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood
But then I was young."
From "Variations on the Word Sleep" by Margaret Atwood:
"I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary."
From "The Starling" by Amy Lowell:
"I weary for desires never guessed,
For alien passions, strange imaginings,
To be some other person for a day."
From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot:
"For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons;
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
From "Life is Fine" by Langston Hughes:
"Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry-
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die."
From "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot:
"These fragments I have shored
Against my ruins."
From "the boys i mean are not refined" by e. e. cummings:
"they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance."
From "To Earthward" by Robert Frost:
"Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear
And once that seemed too much
I lived on air."
From "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden:
"He was my North, my South , my East and my West
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong."
From "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats:
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
From "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll:
"`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrab"
From "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
"Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."
From "Bright Star" by John Keats:
"Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death."
From "Of Mere Being" by Wallace Stevens:
"The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down."
From "Suicide's Note" by Langston Hughes:
"The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss."
From "Be Nobody's Darling" by Alice Walker:
"Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools."
From "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou:
"You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise."
From "Holy Sonnet X" by John Dunne:
"DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so."
From "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils."
From "A Question" by Robert Frost:
"A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth."
From "Apology" by William Carlos Williams:
"The beauty of
the terrible faces
of our nonentities
stirs me to it."
From "Sonnet 116" by William Shakespeare:
"Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shake."
From "Auguries of Innocence" by William Blake:
"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour."
From "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
"We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
From “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
From “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” William Butler Yeats
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
From “The Road Not Taken, ” Robert Frost
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the road less traveled by”
From: “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" W.B. Yeats
"I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
From Song: To Celia" Ben Jonson
"Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine."
From “You Are Jeff" Richard Siken
“but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name
STARLIGHT POETRY BY KAI
View Me on Twitter @kairosoflife
See Creativity Chaos - a Creativity Blog by Kai
About | Reprints & Copyrights | Home
© 2019-2020 Copyright Starlight Poetry
VIEW FULL SITE DIRECTORY
View Me on Twitter @kairosoflife
See Creativity Chaos - a Creativity Blog by Kai
About | Reprints & Copyrights | Home
© 2019-2020 Copyright Starlight Poetry
VIEW FULL SITE DIRECTORY