Poems

«Odi et amo»: I hate and I love, and know not why; I only feel it, and am tormented.

«Ποικιλόθρον᾽ ἀθάνατ᾽ Ἀφρόδιτα»: Sappho invokes Aphrodite in her unrequited love.

«Aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.»: life is short; seize the day.

«Vīvāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amēmus»: let us live and love; give me a thousand kisses, then a thousand more.

'Aestus erat...': Corinna steps into the midday shade — Ovid's most celebrated love elegy.

'Exegi monumentum aere perennius...': a monument more lasting than bronze — Horace on the poet's immortality.

'Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις...': 'Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their words'.

'ἀστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες...': 'you shone as the Morning Star among the living; dead, you shine as the Evening Star among the dead'.

'Εἰμὶ δ' ἐγὼ θεράπων...': 'I am a servant of Ares and skilled in the Muses' gift' — the soldier-poet Archilochus.

'Φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν...': 'he seems to me equal to the gods' — jealousy and the tremor of love in Sappho's fragment 31.

'οὐ χρῆ κάκοισι θῦμον ἐπιτρέπην...': do not surrender your heart to misfortune; the best remedy is wine, says Alcaeus.

'Σφαίρηι δηὖτέ με πορφυρῆι...': golden-haired Eros throws his purple ball — Anacreon's fragment of love.

'τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης;': 'what is life without golden Aphrodite?' — Mimnermus' elegy.

'ἐλατὴρ ὑπέρτατε βροντᾶς... Ζεῦ': 'Highest driver of the thunder, Zeus!' — Pindar's Olympian IV.

'Ὦ ἄνα, Λητοῦς υἱέ...': 'O lord, son of Leto!' — the prayer to Apollo that opens Theognis' work.

Beatrice's appearance strikes every tongue dumb: Dante's sweetest sonnet.

Alone and pensive, he flees people; but Love keeps him company always.

«Mais où sont les neiges d’antan »: where are the beauties of old? Transience made a refrain.

'Alā yā ayyoha-s-sāqī...': the ghazal that opens Hafez's Divan, between wine and love.

'Asrār-e azal rā na to dāni o na man...': Khayyam's quatrain on the riddle no one can read.

'Daʿ al-ayyām...': let the days do as they will — al-Shafi'i's verses of fortitude.

'Mobāraktar shab o khorramtarin ruz...': the night of union and the new day, in a ghazal by Saadi.

'S'i' fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo...': Cecco Angiolieri's comic curse — Dante's rival.

'Libbi ba-mizrah...': 'My heart is in the East and I am at the edge of the West' — Judah Halevi's song of Zion.

'牀前明月光，疑是地上霜...': moonlight over the bed and longing for home — the most memorised Chinese poem.

'Buy-e deldar-e ma nemiayad...': 'the scent of our beloved does not come' — Rumi's mystical longing.

'國破山河在，城春草木深...': the shattered empire and the overgrown city — Du Fu's 'Spring View'.

'空山不見人，但聞人語響...': an empty mountain and light on the moss — Wang Wei's Zen stillness.

The soul goes out in the dark, guided only by the light burning in its breast, to meet the Beloved.

How restful the life of one who flees the world's noise and is content with little.

Seize the sweet fruit of your spring before time and the icy wind change it all.

To live outside oneself, longing for a life so high that one dies of not dying.

He writes her name in the sand; the wave erases it, but the verse saves it.

Garcilaso's first sonnet: to look back and see oneself lost in love.

«Come live with me and be my love»: the summit of the English pastoral.

Love defined by its paradoxes: a fire that burns unseen.

'Cueillez, cueillez vostre jeunesse': the rose that fades in a day — Ronsard's carpe diem.

Seventeen redondillas against the double standard, written in a convent in New Spain.

A sonnet that holds with the imagination what the body cannot keep.

The sonnet that holds love survives the ashes: dust, but dust in love.

Everywhere the poet looks, he sees only ruin and reminders of his own death.

On her own portrait: the art that promises to defeat time is «dust, shadow, nothing».

Enjoy your beauty before it turns to «earth, smoke, dust, shadow, nothing».

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? The poem promises to defeat time with its own lines.

She seeks the one who scorns her and scorns the one who seeks her: the exact anatomy of contrary desire.

Donne defies Death to its face: «Death, thou shalt die».

A sonnet that writes itself by narrating itself, line by line.

«They also serve who only stand and wait»: a blind poet's faith.

«"¡Ah de la vida..!" ¿Nadie me responde?»: the life already gone; yesterday, today and tomorrow confused.

'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may...': the English carpe diem — Herrick's roses.

Her eyes are not the sun, her lips not coral, yet her love is as real as heaven.

Twenty-four lines of questions: who could make you, and made the lamb as well?

A raven perches at midnight and knows only one answer: nevermore.

Everything returns — the swallows, the flowers, the words — except what was ours.

Four lines: she asks what poetry is, and he answers «it is you».

Three women offer themselves; he chooses the third, who is impossible.

Grains of sand slip through the fingers: is all a dream within a dream?

«She walks in beauty, like the night»: praise of a serene, pure beauty.

A childhood love by the sea that neither death nor the envious angels can part.

A king thought himself eternal; of his statue nothing is left but sand to the horizon.

A child asks the lamb who made it, and answers for it: the one who bears its own name.

He begs the waves, the hurricane and the storm to carry him off, for fear of being left alone with himself.

So long as there is mystery and beauty in the world, Bécquer says, there will be poetry.

A tear and a word of forgiveness that pride would not let out; and each went their own way.

A knight seeks Eldorado all his life and grows old without finding it: it lies beyond life.

An invisible worm that flies in the night finds out the rose's bed and destroys it.

Through London's streets, in every face, the marks of woe and the manacles the mind forges.

For a look, a world; for a smile, a heaven; and for a kiss?

Keats's last sonnet: envying a star, but not its solitude.

Rosalía loves the bells; she dreads the day they fall silent for good.

A cloud, ten thousand daffodils, and the joy that returns in memory.

A frozen northern fir tree dreams of a distant southern palm.

A hedge hides the horizon, and thought founders, sweetly, in the infinite.

Eight lines: the calm of the peaks descends to you. «Soon you too will rest.»

Wrath watered in secret grows into a poisoned apple.

«Я вас любил»: Pushkin's most generous farewell to love.

«Белеет парус одинокой»: the lone sail that, restless, seeks the storm.

Sailing the «dry ocean» of the steppe: Mickiewicz's first Crimean sonnet.

«Forse perchè della fatal quïete»: Foscolo greets the evening as the image of eternal peace.

«Még nyílnak a völgyben a kerti virágok»: The flowers still bloom, but winter is coming: love and foreboding.

«Je suis le ténébreux, — le veuf, — l’inconsolé»: the widower, the unconsoled, and his melancholy.

«Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold»: discovering Homer like finding a new world.

«Or poserai per sempre»: «now rest forever, my weary heart».

«Un dì, s’io non andrò sempre fuggendo»: the exile dreams of weeping at his brother's grave.

«Music, when soft voices die»: when you are gone, love itself shall slumber on your memory.

«Der er han selv! Velkommen tusind Gange»: there he is! The poet hails the returning lark, herald of spring even as frost still locks the lake.

«Gyldenlak, før du din Glands har tabt»: the dying poet says farewell to the wallflower at his window, bidding it carry his kiss to the grave.

'Як умру, то поховайте / Мене на могилі...': Shevchenko's testament, Ukraine's most-recited poem.

'Živé naj vsi naródi...': Prešeren's toast to the freedom of all nations — its seventh stanza is the Slovene anthem.

'Cando penso que te fuches, / Negra sombra que m'asombras...': the shadow that haunts Rosalía — a summit of Galician verse.

'Gernikako Arbola / da bedeinkatua...': the oak of Gernika, emblem of Basque liberties — Iparragirre's song.

'Mo issama on minno arm...': Koidula's declaration of love for Estonia, sung at every Song Festival.

'Као златне токе, крвљу покапане...': dusk over the battlefield — a peak of Serbian Romanticism.

'Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel / Die Erde still geküßt...': Eichendorff's moonlit night, a jewel of German Romanticism.

'Молчи, скрывайся и таи...': 'a thought once uttered is a lie' — Tyutchev's 'Silentium!'.

'Mit gelben Birnen hänget...': the summer of swans and the winter of speechless walls — Hölderlin's 'Half of Life'.

'Fjäriln vingad syns på Haga...': the butterfly over Haga amid the mists — Bellman's most delicate song.

“Spring lets its blue ribbon flutter through the air again”: Mörike announces the season in nine lines.

The child cries out: the Erlking has taken him and hurt him.

Autumn sleeps in a granary, while nature sings its own melody.

The world is too much with us, and we have lost our connection to nature.

Under the moonlight, longing carries him to dream of distant, mysterious landscapes.

Hope as a bird that sings without words and never stops at all.

Death stops for you in a carriage, all courtesy, and the ride lasts an eternity.

The ship comes home victorious and the captain lies dead on the deck: Whitman's elegy for Lincoln.

«Yo soy un hombre sincero»: eighteen quatrains by Martí, some of them now the song Guantanamera.

Not one anthem but many voices — each trade singing its own — adding up to a country.

A spider flings thread after thread into the void; so the soul seeks somewhere to anchor.

He grows a white rose alike for the true friend and for the cruel one who wounds him.

The eagle clasped to the crag, close to the sun; below, the sea, and it falls like a thunderbolt.

A sonnet that asks to be remembered — and, in the end, would rather be forgotten than mourned.

«How do I love thee? Let me count the ways»: love measured beyond death.

A soldier sleeps in a sunlit valley; the last line gives it the lie.

A journey at dawn that, in the last line, turns out to be grief.

«The long sobs of the violins of autumn»: pure sound.

«Si ves un monte de espumas, es mi verso lo que ves»: Martí's ars poetica.

«El alma trémula y sola»: Martí before a Spanish dancer's performance.

«Odio la máscara y vicio»: Martí flees the artificial city for the mountain.

«La niña de Guatemala, la que se murió de amor»: Martí's most famous elegy.

«When I heard the learn'd astronomer»: leaving the lecture for the silent stars.

«I'm nobody! Who are you?»: better nobody than a somebody who announces itself.

«Le Temps mange la vie»: youth as a storm and Time as the enemy.

«Estava a Morte ali, em pé, diante»: The soul before death, a sleeping serpent that wakes.

«A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles»: a colour for each vowel, pure synaesthesia.

«Wild nights! Wild nights!»: desire, and the heart as a ship in port.

«Loveliest of trees, the cherry now»: the cherry in bloom and time running out.

«Somnoroase păsărele»: at dusk, all of nature falls asleep.

'San Lorenzo, io lo so perchè tanto / di stelle...': the night of San Lorenzo and the weeping stars — Pascoli's 'X Agosto'.

'Min hvide svane, / du stumme, du stille...': the swan that sings only in death — Ibsen's 'En svane'.

'Säv, säv, susa, / våg, våg, slå...': the ballad of drowned Ingalill amid sedge and waves — Fröding's 'Säv, säv, susa'.

“Grey strand, grey sea, and the town set apart”: Storm’s elegy for his northern home.

“I sought my beloved’s grave and could not find it”: the soul found again in a rose, a nightingale and a star.

“When you still wore your hair in a fringe, I saw you beneath the apple tree”: Shimazaki’s first love.

“Wishing the people to read and understand these verses”: the royal invocation that opens the Khlong Lokanit.

“Ancient maxims that instruct the heart, like a garland worn upon the ear”: the ars poetica of the Khlong Lokanit.

The crimson dawn breaks; the saffron flag shimmers with love and valor.

From childhood, love for home grows to encompass the entire homeland.

Alive, alive! There, on the Balkan, drenched in blood, a young hero lies and groans.

Glory be to God for dappled things and the extraordinary.

A fly's buzz interrupts the silence of death.

The pomegranate tree blooms again, but you, my only love, lie in the cold earth.

A crystal-clear pond, a solitary boat, and the whisper of wind in autumn.

Like lions, we beat the bars of our cage, though the ceiling holds us back.

A sad princess in a palace of gold dreams of being a swallow: pure sound and the longing to escape.

The poem where modernismo watches itself grow old and refuses to forgive itself.

Near the end, Nervo settles his accounts with life and closes them without complaint: we are at peace.

Modernismo's dark reverse: to envy the tree and the stone because they cannot feel.

The sonnet that closes Prosas profanas: the search for a perfect form that slips away.

The Araucanian chief carrying a tree-trunk on his shoulder, carved like a heroic statue.

An evening in the garden, painted with modernismo's exact sensuality.

If a thorn wounds him, he steps away from it, but does not hate it: Nervo's serene ethics.

«Let life take the trouble of killing me»: the self-portrait of Andalusian weariness.

To die, not of life or love, but of a mute thought that grows within.

The elegy for his sister that opened modernismo: «a single long shadow».

«Quiero morir cuando decline el día»: to die young, at dusk, facing the sea.

«Topant de cap en una i altra soca»: the blind cow goes down alone to drink.

From the grey of the pavement, Yeats dreams a cabin on an island and hears it in the deep heart's core.

A winter school afternoon, the multiplication table chanted in chorus, and rain on the windowpanes.

A half-dead elm puts out green leaves, and the poet notes the miracle before the axe.

Of all the roads, the good people who work, dream, and rest beneath the earth.

Many loved your beauty; only one loved the soul within it and the sorrow of your changing face.

Machado's self-portrait: a good man, without finery, who awaits his last day light of luggage.

The Great War's elegy: gun-fire for the bells of those who die as cattle.

A man's single tear, and the grief of centuries a woman inherits.

«There are blows in life, so hard…»: the book that begins the avant-garde in Spanish.

«O poeta é um fingidor»: feigning so wholly that one feigns one's own pain.

The honour of those who keep their duty, even knowing Ephialtes will come.

«Dagen svalnar mot kvällen ...»: the day cools toward evening; four scenes of desire and disillusion — «you sought a flower and found a fruit».

'Denkend aan Holland...': the wide rivers, the polders and the voice of the water — the Dutch poem of the century.

'Chitto jetha bhoyshunno...': 'Where the mind is without fear', Tagore's most quoted poem.

'Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe...': the panther's gaze, for which behind a thousand bars there is no world — Rilke's thing-poem.

'Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine...': under the bridge flows the Seine and our loves — Apollinaire's poem with its refrain 'vienne la nuit'.

'Em atitudes e em ritmos fleumáticos...': Florbela Espanca's sensual, hieratic sonnet.

'Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека...': 'night, street, streetlamp, drugstore' — Blok's inescapable circularity.

'Sub luna amo. / Mörk är min brud...': under the moon I love, drink, sing, live and die — Karlfeldt's meditation.

“When you tire of me and go, I will strew azaleas on your path”: the most famous farewell in Korean poetry.

“I love the sun-sweet word of my sweet Armenia”: the most quoted declaration of love for the homeland in Armenian.

“Not losing to the rain, not losing to the wind”: Japan’s best-loved vow of humility.

“Crimson and honeyed, this land of ours, where the far horizon finds its one support”: Prasad’s hymn to the land.

“From the Himalaya’s high peak, freedom calls — march on, march on!”: Prasad’s freedom song.

I want a piece of land, with coconut trees and moonlight like a pearl.

Ah, flower! Where now lies your splendour, after your brief bloom?

Autumn arrives, bringing the stillness of days that are ending.

Córdoba, distant and alone, watches from beyond the road.

In a world torn apart, a fierce beast approaches Bethlehem to be born.

The golden grove has ceased to speak in its gay birch tongue.

The salt sea, how much of your salt is tears of Portugal!

If one day morning breaks over this country too, Halûk, live for that dawn.

My God — I have lost my form, I am shattered.

The corncrake's song in my ears, a full moon over the ears of grain.