Alison Croggon Poems

Hit Title Date Added
1.
Goodnight, Sweet Prince...

Such possessions as gore me pontificate from corners.
I am no longer solid but a speech of butterflies.
How it spills, when all is said and done:
It is hard to see virtue in the cold matter
...

2.
The Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy

Sometime, leaving this violent vision,
I’ll sing up joy and glory to assenting angels.
Let none of the clearstruck hammers of my heart
fail against softening, uncertain or
...

3.
The Duino Elegies: The Third Elegy

One thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas,
that hidden guilty rivergod of blood.
Her distantly known boy, her lover, what does he know
of the lords of lust, who often, out of his loneliness,
...

4.
The Duino Elegies: The Second Elegy

Every angel is terrible. And yet, alas,
when I hear of you, deadly birds of the soul,
I desire you. How long since the days of Tobias,
when one of the radiant would stand at the plain front door,
...

5.
The Duino Elegies: The First Elegy

Who, if I cry, hears me among the angelic
orders? and even supposing one of them seized me
suddenly to his heart: I’d vanish
in his violent presence. For beauty is nothing
...

6.
The Branch (Translation)

Branch I pick up from the edge of the woods
Only to abandon you at the world’s end,
Hidden among stones, in the shelter
Where the other path invisibly begins
...

7.
The Duino Elegies: The Ninth Elegy

Why, when it approaches, the interval of life
surges forward, as laurel, a little darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on every
leaf edge (like a smiling wind) -: why then
...

8.
The Duino Elegies: The Eigth Elegy

With all its eyes the creaturely sees
the open. But our eyes are
as if reversed and placed all round it
like snares ringing its free departure.
...

9.
The Duino Elegies: The Seventh Elegy

Woo no more, no wooing, outgrowing voice,
be your natural cry; your cry pure as the bird
when the heightening seasons lift him up, almost forgetting
that he is a pitiable animal and not just a single heart
...

10.
The Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy

O trees of life, where’s winter?
We are not one. Are not intelligent
as flocking birds. Outstripped and late,
we hurl ourselves into sudden winds
...

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