Poetry Collection for BBA/BCA D-I as per Syllabus for MB English Course

1. Spring by William Shakespeare

When daisies pied, and violets blue,

And lady-smocks all silver-white,

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight,

The cuckoo then, on every tree,

Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

'Cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo!' O word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear.

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,

And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks,

When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,

And maidens bleach their summer smocks,

The cuckoo then, on every tree,

Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

'Cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo!' O word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear.

2.Life by George Herbert

I made a posie, while the day ran by:

Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie

My life within this band.

But time did becken to the flowers, and they

By noon most cunningly did steal away

And wither'd in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart:

I took, without more thinking, in good part

Times gentle admonition:

Who did so sweetly deaths sad taste convey

Making my minde to smell my fatall day;

Yet sugring the suspicion.

Farewell deare flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,

Fit, while ye liv'd, for smell or ornament,

And after death for cures.

I follow straight without complaints or grief,

Since if my sent be good, I care not, if

It be as short as yours.

 

3. A Little Learning by Alexander Pope

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,

In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts ;

While from the bounded level of our mind

Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise

New distant scenes of endless science rise!

So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,

Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky ;

The eternal snows appear already past,

And the first clouds and mountains seem the last ;

But those attained, we tremble to survey

The growing labours of the lengthened way ;

The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,

Hill peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

 4. A slumber did my sprit seal by Williams Wordsworth

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seem'd a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

5. The Poets Dream - P.B. Shelley

ON a Poet's lips I slept,

Dreaming like a love-adept

In the sound his breathing kept;

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aerial kisses

Of shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses

 He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume

The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,

 Nor heed nor see what things they be—

But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,

  Nurslings of Immortality!

 6. The Human Seasons - John Keats

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;

There are four seasons in the mind of man:

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously

Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves

To ruminate, and by such dreaming high

Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings

He furleth close; contented so to look

On mists in idleness—to let fair things

Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,

Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

7. Now Fades by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Now fades the last long streak of snow,
     Now burgeons every maze of quick
      About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.

Now rings the woodland loud and long,
      The distance takes a lovelier hue,
      And drown'd in yonder living blue
The lark becomes a sightless song.

Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
      The flocks are whiter down the vale,
      And milkier every milky sail
On winding stream or distant sea;

Where now the seamew pipes, or dives
      In yonder greening gleam, and fly
      The happy birds, that change their sky
To build and brood; that live their lives

From land to land; and in my breast
      Spring wakens too; and my regret
      Becomes an April violet,
And buds and blossoms like the rest.

8. BEFORE THE WORLD WAS MADE, by W. B. Yeats

If I make the lashes dark

And the eyes more bright

And the lips more scarlet,

Or ask if all be right

From mirror after mirror,

No vanity's displayed:

I'm looking for the face I had

Before the world was made.

What if I look upon a man

As though on my beloved,

And my blood be cold the while

And my heart unmoved?

Why should he think me cruel

Or that he is betrayed?

I'd have him love the thing that was

Before the world was made.

9. Futility by Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

10. If I should be not alive by Emily Dickinson

If I should n't Be Alive
When the robins come,
Give the one in red cravat
A memorial crumb.
If I could n't thank you,
Being just asleep,
You will know I'm trying
With my granite lip!