Poetry

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

The Uses of Adversity (from As You Like It)

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stone, And good in every thing.

William Blake (1757 - 1827)

Every cell opens into eternity

And every space smaller than a globule of man's blood opens into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow.

In the elements of the world are hid the whole of creation

                                           To see a world in a grain of sand

                                           And a heaven in a wild flower

                                           Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

                                           And eternity in an hour

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

                                In common things that round us lie

                                           Some random truths he can impart.

                                The harvest of a quiet eye

                                           That broods and sleeps on his own heart

The world is too much with us

          The world is too much with us;

                     Late and soon,

                     Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away,

                     a sordid boon!

          This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

                     The winds that will be howling at all hours,

                     And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for every thing, we are out of tune.

          It moves us not, -- Great God! I'd rather be

                     A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;

                     So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

                     Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Cullen Bryant (1794 - 1878)

     God's First Temples

The groves were God's first temples.

          Ere man learned

To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,

And spread the roof above them -- ere he

          framed

The lofty vault, to gather and roll back

The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,

Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,

And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks

          and supplication.

                                For his simple heart

Might not resist the sacred influences

Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,

And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven

Mingled their mossy boughs, and from

          the sound

Of the invisible breath that swayed at once

All their green tops, stole over him, and

          bowed.

His spirit with the thought of boundless power

And inaccessible majesty....

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

The Manuscripts of God

And nature, the old nurse, took

          The child upon her knee,

Saying, "Here is a story book

          My Father hath writ for thee.

Come, wander with me," she said,

          "In regions yet untrod,

And read what is still unread

          in the manuscripts of God."

The laws of nature are just

The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature... were man as unerring in his judgements as nature.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892)

The mercy of God extends to the creatures

The sooner we recognize the fact that the mercy of the Almighty extends to every creature endowed with life, the better it will be for us as men and Christians.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

Tennyson is responsive to the scientific thought of his day while preserving the

highest mystical sentiments about creation.... A keen observer of nature...

Flower in the Crannied Wall

          Flower in the crannied wall,

          I pluck you out of the crannies,

          I hold you here, root and all, in my

                     hand,

          Little flower -- but if I could understand

          What you are, root and all, and all in

                     all,

          I should know what God and man is.

The Higher Pantheism

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas,

     the hills, and the plains,

Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him, who reigns?

Is not the Vision He, tho' He be not that which He seems?

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?

Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why,

For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel "I am I"?

Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,

Making Him broken gleams and a stifled splendor and gloom.

Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet --

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice,

For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.

Law is God, say some; no God at all, says the fool,

For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;

But if we could see and hear, this Vision -- were it not He?

T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

A Consequence of the materialism which we today call overconsumption

                                Descend lower, descend only

                                Into the world of perpetual solitude,

                                World not world, but that which is not world,

                                Internal darkness, deprivation

                                And destitution of all property,

                                Desiccation of the world of sense,

                                Evacuation of the world of fancy,

                                Inoperancy of the world of spirit....

                                                                 Burnt Norton III, in Four Quartets,

                                                                Faber and Faber, London, 1950

Lord Byron

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar;

I love not man less, but nature more.