The Arrow and The Song
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Arrow and The Song
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
One Day I Wrote Her Name
Edmund Spencer
Paul Laurence Dunbar
I Am Not Alone
Gabriela Mistral
The night, it is deserted
from the mountains to the sea.
But I, the one who rocks you,
I am not alone!
The sky, it is deserted
for the moon falls to the sea.
But I, the one who holds you,
I am not alone !
The world, it is deserted.
All flesh is sad you see.
But I, the one who hugs you,
I am not alone!
If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Love
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Dreaming of love, the ardent mind of youth
Conceives it one with passion’s brief delights,
With keen desire and rapture. But, in truth,
These are but milestones to sublime heights
After the highways, swept by strong emotions,
Where wild winds blow and blazing sun rays beat,
After the billows of tempestuous oceans,
Fair mountain summits wait the lover’s feet.
The path is narrow, but the view is wide,
And beauteous the outlook towards the west
Happy are they who walk there side by side,
Leaving below the valleys of unrest,
And on the radiant altitudes above
Know the serene intensity of love.
Invictus
William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Thought Magnets
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
With each strong thought, with every earnest longing
For aught thou deemest needful to thy soul,
Invisible vast forces are set thronging
Between thee and that goal.
‘Tis only when some hidden weakness alters
And changes thy desire, or makes it less,
That this mysterious army ever falters
Or stops short of success.
Thought is a magnet; and the longed-for pleasure
Or boon, or aim, or object, is the steel;
And is attainment hangs but on the measure
Of what thy soul can feel.
Unending Love
Tagore
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.