The Chained Muse

Lay Down Your Armor

Lay down your armor And play for me your precious lyre; And let me hear Your deepest dreams and frail desires. Lay down your armor And...

Aesthetic Impressions of an American Poet in Rome

“Go thou to Rome, at once the paradise, the grave, the city and the wilderness,…” Percy Byssche Shelley wrote his beautiful elegy on the...

Legend of the Horseshoe by Wolfgang Goethe

When Jesus Christ still walked over the Earth, Outcast, and not yet known by holy birth, Though followed by many an eager youth Who...

Telling the Bees About Reverence

They know what I will say. I will tell them how ants covered a dead bumblebee in cherry petals, how they came bearing more than their...

Sestina: Mushrooms

Metamorphosis Up from the shadowed forest floor you rise, Grim undertakers in the train of death From whose smashed, stinking remnants...

Come As You Are by Rabindranath Tagore

Come as you are, forget appearances! Is your hair untamable, your part uneven, your bodice unfastened? Never mind. Come as you are,...

Beyond the Lines: Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

A century after its composition, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” continues to leave readers, academics, poetry...

Triumph of Roses

The young earth hardened, heated, split, then froze, but still could not disorient the rose. We kept the emails, pictures, cards in...

Last Light

The last moment of sunshine dribbles from the watering-can. The moon, hunchback on a cloud, gathers its borrowed light, as the...

Behind the Lines: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 142

The sonnet is inextricably intertwined with the Renaissance, and stands as one of the most powerful and enduring legacies of that time....

Word Sonnets by Seymour Mayne

The word sonnet is a relatively new variation of the traditional form. In essence, it is a fourteen line poem, with one word set for each...

Von ewiger Liebe (Eternal Love) Set by Brahms

So dark, so dark the willow forests loom; The skies are wintered and the evening hushed. Now neither shroud nor light nor vapors rise,...