Verse Poems

Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 3:43 am

Verse Poems
What is A Poem that is blank verse and about nature or love?

I need a poem for English and i have collected several but i still need a blank verse poem…the other poems are about love, virginity, or nature. Please help! Thanks

“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.

This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin (read by Larkin)