Living By

Walking, snow falling, it is possible
to focus at various distances
in turn on separate flakes, sharply engage
the attention at several spatial points:
the nearer cold and more uncomfortable,
the farther distanced and almost pleasing.

Living, time passing, it is preferable
to focus the memory in turn upon
the more distant retrospects in order
that the present mind may retain its peace.

Yet knowing that seeing and remembering
are both of course personal illusions.

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson was an English playwright and poet, best known for his satirical plays and lyric poetry. Born on June 11, 1572, Jonson's works, including 'Volpone' and 'The Alchemist,' were critical of social norms and human follies. A contemporary and rival of Shakespeare, he was a significant figure in English Renaissance literature. Jonson also contributed to the development of English poetry through his masques and epigrams. He died on August 6, 1637.

Ben Jonson

Karolin's Song

Ben Jonson, Simple Poetry

Natural Progress

Ben Jonson, Simple Poetry

Conditions Of Living

Ben Jonson, Simple Poetry

That Women Are But Men's Shadows

Ben Jonson, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Nine Stages Towards Knowing

Why do we lie

Why do we lie, she questioned, her warm eyes
on the grey Autumn wind and its coursing,
all afternoon wasted in bed like this?
Because we cannot lie all night together.
Yes, she said, satisfied at my reasoning,
but going on to search her cruel mind
for better excuses to leave my narrow bed.

Too many flesh suppers

Abstracted in art,
in architecture,
in scholars detail;

absorbed by music,
by minutiae,
by sad trivia;

all to efface her,
whom I can forget
no more than breathing.

Theatregoer

Somewhere some nights she sees
curtains rise on those rites
we also knew and felt

I sit here desolate
in spite of company

Love is between people

And sho...

Ben Jonson

Of Memory. From Proverbial Philosophy

Where art thou, storehouse of the mind, gamer of facts and fancies, 
In what strange firmament are laid the beams of thine airy chambers?
Or art thou that small cavern, the centre of the rolling brain,
Where still one sandy morsel testifieth man's original?
Or hast thou some grand globe, some common hall of intellect,
Some spacious market-place for thought, where all do bring their wares.
And gladly rescued from the littleness, the narrow closet of a self,
The privileged soul hath large access, coming in the livery of learning?
Live we as isolated worlds, perfect in substance and spirit,
Each a sphere, with a special mind, prisoned in its shell of matter?
Or rather, as converging radiations, parts of one majestic whole.
Beams of the Sun, streams from the River, branches of the mighty...

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Presence Of Mind

    Spring heralds the summer with lilacs perched from that door.

    In snows, a swarm of bushes lie black and apparently rootless as the town's iron-gate bridge collapses under the centre part of the main road.

    Little enclaves of activity pass as stores, mere centrefolds across busy highway arteries this time of year.

    I am a grey fleck in my dark wool coat near the perimeter of a winding fence.

    The casual observer gives me half a chance to be seen in the deathless white, opaque coloured moonstone so still against the field's shores.

    A plaster river, her sides inserted with isle-dotted chunks, hands across a winter solstice tribal dance.

    Ostensibly, I poke the land from stylized limbo, a chalky substance disturbed with every movement's cough.

Paul Cameron Brown

Memory

In silence and in darkness memory wakes
Her million sheathèd buds, and breaks
That day-long winter when the light and noise
And hard bleak breath of the outward-looking will
Made barren her tender soil, when every voice
Of her million airy birds was muffled or still.

One bud-sheath breaks:
One sudden voice awakes.

What change grew in our hearts, seeing one night
That moth-winged ship drifting across the bay,
    Her broad sail dimly white
On cloudy waters and hills as vague as they?
Some new thing touched our spirits with distant delight,
Half-seen, half-noticed, as we loitered down,
Talking in whispers, to the little town,
    Down from the narrow hill
    Talking in whispers, for the air so still
Imposed its stillness on our lips, and made

Edward Shanks

Self-Unconscious

    Along the way
    He walked that day,
Watching shapes that reveries limn,
    And seldom he
    Had eyes to see
The moment that encompassed him.

    Bright yellowhammers
    Made mirthful clamours,
And billed long straws with a bustling air,
    And bearing their load
    Flew up the road
That he followed, alone, without interest there.

    From bank to ground
    And over and round
They sidled along the adjoining hedge;
    Sometimes to the gutter
    Their yellow flutter
Would dip from the nearest slatestone ledge.

    The smooth sea-line
    With a metal shine,
And flashes of white, and a sail thereon,
    He would also descry
    With a half-wrapt eye
Between the projects he mused upon.

  ...

Thomas Hardy

Moments Of Vision

    That mirror
Which makes of men a transparency,
    Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see
    Of you and me?

    That mirror
Whose magic penetrates like a dart,
    Who lifts that mirror
And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,
    Until we start?

    That mirror
Works well in these night hours of ache;
    Why in that mirror
Are tincts we never see ourselves once take
    When the world is awake?

    That mirror
Can test each mortal when unaware;
    Yea, that strange mirror
May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,
    Glassing it - where?

Thomas Hardy