Of Joan's Youth

by Louise Imogen Guiney English

I would unto my fair restore
A simple thing:
The flushing cheek she had before!
Out-velveting
No more, no more,
By Severn shore,
The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing.

Ah, say how winds in flooding grass
Unmoor the rose;
Or guileful ways the salmon pass
To sea, disclose;
For so, alas,
With Love, alas,
With fatal, fatal Love, a girlhood goes.

More poems by Louise Imogen Guiney

A Footnote to a Famous Lyric

True love’s own talisman, which here
Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
A steel-and-velvet Cavalier …
In Leinster

I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while.
Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile;
Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all, …
Martyr's Memorial

Such natural debts of love our Oxford knows,
So many ancient dues undesecrate,
I marvel how the landmark of a hate …
Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore

There in his room, whene’er the moon looks in,
And silvers now a shell, and now a fin,
And o’er his chart glides like an argosy, …

All poems by Louise Imogen Guiney →

Of Joan's Youth

More poems by Louise Imogen Guiney

A Footnote to a Famous Lyric

In Leinster

Martyr's Memorial

Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore