What is a poem that is blank verse and about nature or love?

3 thoughts on “What is a poem that is blank verse and about nature or love?”

1. Surviving says:

   March 15, 2010 at 3:46 am

   Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsy written in 1916.

   Lilichka!

   Tobacco smoke eats the air away.
   The room,–
   A chapter from Kruchenykh’s Inferno
   Recall,–
   By the window
   That day
   I caressed you ecstatically, with fervor
   Here you sit now,
   With your heart in iron armor.
   In a day,
   You’ll scold me perhaps
   And tell me to leave.
   Frenzied, my trembling arm in a gloomy parlor
   Will hardly be able to fit the sleeve.
   I’ll rush out
   And hurl my body into the street,–
   Distraught,
   Lashed by despair and sadness
   There’s no need for this,
   My darling,
   my sweet.
   Let’s part tonight and end this madness,
   Either way,
   My love is
   An arduous weight,
   Hanging on you
   Wherever you flee.
   Let me bellow out in a final complaint
   All of my heartbroken misery.
   A laboring bull, if he had enough,
   Will leave
   And find cool water to lie in
   But for me
   There’s no sea
   Except for your love,–
   From which even tears won’t earn me some quiet.
   If an elephant wants to relax, he’ll lie,
   Pompous, outside in the sun-baked dune,
   Except for you love,
   There’s no sun
   In the sky
   And I don’t know where you are of with whom.
   If you thus tormented another poet,
   He
   Would trade in his love for money and fame
   But
   Nothing sounds as precious to me as the ringing sound of your darling name.
   I won’t drink poison,
   Or jump to demise,
   Or pull the trigger to take my own life.
   Except for your eyes,
   No blade can control me,
   No sharpened knife.
   Tomorrow you’ll forget
   That it was I who crowned you,
   Who burned out the blossoming soul with love
   And days will form a whirling carnival
   That will ruffle my manuscripts and lift them above..
   Will the dry autumn leaves of my sentences
   Cause you to pause,
   Breathing hard?
   Let me
   Pave a path with final tenderness
   For your footsteps as you depart.

2. xo379 says:

   March 15, 2010 at 3:46 am

   Bees and Morning Glories
   by John Ciardi
   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=176398

   Birches
   by Robert Frost
   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173524

3. Technician of Sacred Things says:

   March 15, 2010 at 3:46 am

   “The Lovers’ Bridge”

   When he first saw her how could he have known
   Her heart or history, the seas she’d crossed
   While searching for a love to match her own?
   But there she stood, out on the windswept heights,
   Beyond the hermitage he’d often passed
   On the long cedar path out to the bridge.

   As if she’d seen the hillside from above
   She raised her eyes and fixed them on his own
   Before demurely tilting them away.
   If she had known she’d smitten him with love,
   That he would stay forever at her side,
   Her heart would not have run to girlish play.

   Then he approached, and spoke to her at last,
   Her soul and ears inclined to hear his words,
   And reassured, she strolled the ochre road
   Out past the furthest point she’d ever been.
   She didn’t see the shadows had grown long,
   So rushing back they planned to meet again.

   And so she came to his old country home,
   A fine estate where generations past
   Had lived and died, and all with the regret
   We surely too have known from time to time.
   And on his porch she found him, on the swing
   Beneath the canopy all dressed in green

   With his eyes turned aside as if he thought
   She would not come to be with him tonight,
   And there he looked in silence at his hand
   As though he’d hoped to find a diamond there.
   She spoke, and then he raised his head and smiled
   As she slipped soft and silent to his side.

   And there she hung for all the evening long;
   They laughed and smiled, though neither could quite say
   Just what it was the other needed most.
   Sometimes an action louder speaks than words
   But not this night and when she went away
   She thought, “He does not love me after all.”

   And so the coy quaint mistress she became
   To feed the fires of ardor in his heart;
   He did not understand the games she played,
   Unpracticed in the art of old romance,
   And when he stole a glance she looked away…
   He thought, “She only flirts and would not stay.”

   And then one day they came to walk at last
   Out on the road where first they met beyond
   The hermitage, and they continued on
   The winding path out to the old stone bridge,
   Where they walked to the highest point and paused
   As if the laws of nature also would.

   He clasped her hand in silence soft and sweet
   And feigned to speak but cast his moist eyes down
   At that small universe of fingers laced
   And knew there were no words to woo her heart
   That sounded half so sweet upon his tongue…
   In awkward silence all his world fell ‘round.

   And so to save him from the pain she knew
   He felt, she softly kissed him on the cheek;
   “I’m not the flawless one your heart desires,”
   She whispered, and the half truth stung her eyes,
   So wrapped in lies the two made their retreat
   From the grand arc connecting their two worlds.

   But what could not be said because of fear
   That speech would kill the thing both wanted most
   Lived in the surreal nightscape of their dreams
   Along with guilt, so terrible that he
   One autumn day went on a final trek
   Out to the mute, imperishable bridge

   With a fine coil of rope laid on his arm
   Already knotted for the awful plan
   He could not quite imagine, but when he
   Reached the arc’s lowest point he looped it ‘round
   His neck and tied it to the pillar strong
   And then, but only then, his pain was done.

   As if the Lord in Heaven knew her heart,
   But could not heal it, she lit out one day
   And traveling all the way to the old bridge
   She saw beneath its ivied canopy
   Her love, his eyes gazed empty toward his hand;
   Then silently, she pulled the long silk sash

   From off her waist, and tied it to his rope
   And found herself atop the stony arch,
   Then but a second later underneath
   But inches from the only one she loved,
   The great span that connected two lost worlds
   Above them now for all eternity.

   At last, the villagers would cut them down
   And give them rites as best the Church allowed
   But it was said with curiosity
   And awe at that great thing that brought them there,
   The last remains were woven hand in hand
   By something not a one could understand.

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