“My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.” – Robert Frost

“For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.” – T.S. Eliot

“To man only does anything pass away. To the creating mind and to such as can approach sufficiently near it, is one eternal present. Outward forms addressed to our organs pass away.” – Henry James Slack

“I have seen a flower blooming in beauty in a secluded vale, and, ere I had a chance to look again, a chilly breath of air had scattered its petals and left it a ruin.” ~Charles Lanman

“You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.” – Mark Twain

“It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.” – K.T. Jong

Hello everyone and welcome to our last week at Prompt Nights. Wait wait hold on just a minute there, last week you say? Well yes, but good news is I have been invited to join the Toads 🙂 so we ll be commencing there from now on. And so in the light of upcoming events, this week we are here to honor and to celebrate Magaly Guerrero and Rommy Driks, my two best buddies, whose birthdays are on April 5th and 27th ❤ which is why our subject is Dark Poetry. For your pleasure and source of inspiration, below is a list of writers who were the masters of this genre:

William Blake, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, George Gordon Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy, Langston Hughes, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Milton, Ezra Pound, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Butler Yeats.

Now choose one from the list mentioned above 🙂 have fun indulging in their poetry and pick a quote or poem that inspires you best to write your piece. And remember, attendance is a must!❤ For further inspiration please refer to the four amazing poems below:

Dream Land  

by Christina Rossetti

Where sunless rivers weep
Their waves into the deep,
She sleeps a charmed sleep:
Awake her not.
Led by a single star,
She came from very far
To seek where shadows are
Her pleasant lot.

She left the rosy morn,
She left the fields of corn,
For twilight cold and lorn
And water springs.
Through sleep, as through a veil,
She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.

Rest, rest, a perfect rest
Shed over brow and breast;
Her face is toward the west,
The purple land.
She cannot see the grain
Ripening on hill and plain;
She cannot feel the rain
Upon her hand.

Rest, rest, for evermore
Upon a mossy shore;
Rest, rest at the heart’s core
Till time shall cease:
Sleep that no pain shall wake;
Night that no morn shall break
Till joy shall overtake
Her perfect peace.

She Walks In Beauty 

by George Gordon Byron

She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Passage

by Hart Crane

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.

Sulking, sanctioning the sun,
My memory I left in a ravine,-
Casual louse that tissues the buck-wheat,
Aprons rocks, congregates pears
In moonlit bushels
And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.

Dangerously the summer burned
(I had joined the entrainments of the wind).
The shadows of boulders lengthened my back:
In the bronze gongs of my cheeks
The rain dried without odour.

‘It is not long, it is not long;
See where the red and black
Vine-stanchioned valleys-‘: but the wind
Died speaking through the ages that you know
And bug, chimney-sooted heart of man!
So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke
Compiles a too well-known biography.

The evening was a spear in the ravine
That throve through very oak. And had I walked
The dozen particular decimals of time?
Touching an opening laurel, I found
A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.

”Why are you back here-smiling an iron coffin?
‘ ‘To argue with the laurel,’ I replied:
‘Am justified in transience, fleeing
Under the constant wonder of your eyes-.’

He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies
Sand troughed us in a glittering,, abyss.
A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
-On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and
drummed.
What fountains did I hear? What icy speeches?
Memory, committed to the page, had broke.

Love’s Philosophy

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another’s being mingle–
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;–
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

 

So pick up a pen and lets begin! As always the prompt will remain open the entire week so that everyone can write according to their own pace and time. Please click on the blue widget below. When it opens be sure to click on “add your link.” Now skip the blanks and proceed directly to “try here” written at the end in small font. It will direct you on how to link your poem. Please visit other Poets and do comment on their poems. Have fun ❤