Quotes about plank, page 12
The King and the Sea
After His Realms and States were moved
To bare their hearts to the King they loved,
Tendering themselves in homage and devotion,
The Tide Wave up the Channel spoke
To all those eager, exultant folk:-
'Hear now what Man was given you by the Ocean!
'There was no thought of Orb or Crown
When the single wooden chest went down
To the steering-flat, and the careless Gunroom haled him
To learn by ancient and bitter use,
How neither Favour nor Excuse,
Nor aught save his sheer self henceforth availed him.
'There was no talk of birth or rank
By the slung hammock or scrubbed plank
In the steel-grated prisons where 1 cast him;
But niggard hours and a narrow space
For rest-and the naked light on his face-
While the ship's traffic flowed, unceasing, past him.
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poem by Rudyard Kipling
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While I Gaze In Your Eyes
While I gaze in your eyes, cool cerulean blue,
Sifting night, straining stars through morning's sweet dew,
I can fathom the depths of empyreal skies,
Angels fluttering by, riding wild butterflies
While I gaze in your eyes, changing, aqua-blue greening,
I'm sucked into chasms, cascading, careening,
And yield to enticements which meekly disarm,
Seeping virtuous beauty, sad sensuous charm
While I gaze in your eyes, bleeding fiery blue
Ever tempting with treasures, with pleasures for two,
Being caught at the core of a blazing sapphire
Possessing, enthralling, aflame with desire
While I gaze in your eyes, misty emeralds, deep green,
Veiling laughter and banter, and echoes between,
Then I dream, so it seems, in whatever the place,
Of your scent, of your breath, of your radiant face
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poem by Terry O'Leary
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Monotony In Monochrome
Man's mortal coil as Alcatraz
unwinds as time destroys
free guarantees of razzmatazz
immortality enjoys.
For one day they both fall to dust,
clay's memory bluff bait,
tale failed bewailed by few who must
themselves disintegrate.
Monotony in monochrome
dismisses clear solutions
from fear they'll fail, dream honeycomb
falls dull on bees-waxed ear.
Day from dark gray to darker barred
dips down, blood mud that night
pumps plainly through veined veil to guard
from suicidal plight.
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poem by Jonathan Robin
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Boy-Dreams
I was a Pirate once,
A blustering fellow with scarlet sash,
A ready cutlass and language rash;
From a ship with a rum-filled water-tank
I made the enemy walk the plank;
I marooned a man on an island bare,
And seized his wife by her long, dark hair;
Took treasure, such heaps of it!—wealth untold—
Bright bars of silver and chunks of gold!
Till my ship was choked to the decks with pelf,
And no one dare touch it except myself
And my black flag waved to the tearing breeze,
And I was the terror of all the seas!
I was a Fairy once.
I swung in the bows of the silky oak,
And the harebells rang to the words I spoke,
And my wings were fashioned of silver gauze,
And I knew no grief and no human laws.
And I lived where the laces of green leaves sway.
And my life was one long, long holiday.
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poem by Mabel Forrest
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Fergus Falling
He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures
of the fifties - some program to enrich the rich
and rebuke the forefathers
who cleared it all at once with ox and axe -
climbed to the top, probably to get out
of the shadow
not of those forefathers but of this father
and saw for the first time
down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off
its little steam in the afternoon,
pond where Clarence Akley came on Sunday mornings to cut down
the cedars around the shore, I'd sometimes hear the slow spondees
of his work, he's gone,
where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was fishing and
stood awhile before I knew he was there, he's the one who put the
cedar shingles on the house, some have curled or split, a few have
blown off, he's gone,
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poem by Galway Kinnell
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The Pier-Glass
Lost manor where I walk continually
A ghost, while yet in woman's flesh and blood;
Up your broad stairs mounting with outspread fingers
And gliding steadfast down your corridors
I come by nightly custom to this room,
And even on sultry afternoons I come
Drawn by a thread of time-sunk memory.
Empty, unless for a huge bed of state
Shrouded with rusty curtains drooped awry
(A puppet theatre where malignant fancy
Peoples the wings with fear). At my right hand
A ravelled bell-pull hangs in readiness
To summon me from attic glooms above
Service of elder ghosts; here at my left
A sullen pier-glass cracked from side to side
Scorns to present the face as do new mirrors
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.
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poem by Robert Graves
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For the Union Dead
Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
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poem by Robert Lowell
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Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 1. The Musician's Tale; The Saga of King Olaf XIII. -- The Building Of The Long Serpent
Thorberg Skafting, master-builder,
In his ship-yard by the sea,
Whistling, said, 'It would bewilder
Any man but Thorberg Skafting,
Any man but me!'
Near him lay the Dragon stranded,
Built of old by Raud the Strong,
And King Olaf had commanded
He should build another Dragon,
Twice as large and long.
Therefore whistled Thorberg Skafting,
As he sat with half-closed eyes,
And his head turned sideways, drafting
That new vessel for King Olaf
Twice the Dragon's size.
Round him busily hewed and hammered
Mallet huge and heavy axe;
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poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Every Thing
Since man has been articulate,
Mechanical, improvidently wise,
(Servant of Fate),
He has not understood the little cries
And foreign conversations of the small
Delightful creatures that have followed him
Not far behind;
Has failed to hear the sympathetic call
Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind
Reposeful Teraphim
Of his domestic happiness; the Stool
He sat on, or the Door he entered through:
He has not thanked them, overbearing fool!
What is he coming to?
But you should listen to the talk of these.
Honest they are, and patient they have kept,
Served him without his Thank you or his Please. . .
I often heard
The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word,
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poem by Harold Monro
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The Crucifixion [The Light of The World]
They sunk a post into the ground
Where their leaders bade them stop;
It was a man’s height, and they spiked
A crosspiece to the top.
They bound it well with thongs of hide,
To make it firm and good;
Then roughly, with His back to this,
Their enemy they stood.
They held His hands upon the piece,
And they spiked them to the wood.
They mocked Him then—the while He rocked
In agony His head—
With things that He had never done,
And He had never said—
With that which He had never been—
And in His face they spat.
They placed a plank beside the post,
And they spiked His feet to that.
They pelted Him, but not with stones,
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poem by Henry Lawson
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