![]() And here Lucille Clifton shows us that both joy and self-love radiating from a black woman is also a kind of defiance. Against a world that has marked us invisible and unworthy, black joy is important. I have carried this sonnet-both an ode to the self and also an act of resistance-inside me like gospel, like armor. What a balm and a blessing this poem has been to me. We stand in the June of our lives and try to sing it all the way through each season, always ending each line on the word that brings us together as much as it pivots us into new revelations: We. One waiting around the bend of each American corner. One for every day of the week, one for each of our deadly sins. Like ourselves when we look in the blurry mid-morning mirror. Like our cousins nodded off into prison terms or hyped into the ground. Know them like our neighbor's boy gone bloodied to bullets. Anyplace where sin gets hymned out-straitlaced into storefront chapels on Sunday mornings-but sewn back into Saturday night doo-wopped breakbeats, finger-snapped shuffles of promise. Someplace where the rhyme is always as good as the reason, anyplace where the cost of gin is precious enough to thin but solemn enough to pour on the sidewalk for the departed, anyplace where the schools are overcrowded and underfunded and black and brown enough to not really miss the Seven, who were underperforming on the standardized tests and had been diagnosed as ADD or BDD status anyway. Them lounging streetcornerwise in our consciousness under some flickered neon of mannish-boy dream. Although he’s better known for his poems about experience – he famously titled one of his volumes of poetry The Less Deceived – there was another side to Philip Larkin, which wrote about the awe and serenity found in innocent scenes, such as here, in this poem about lambs learning to walk in the snow, unaware that the world of nature beneath the snow that will soon be revealed to them when winter passes."We Real Cool" is the poem so many of us know from grade school: the Seven (that sacred number of the seeker, the thinker, the mysterious) at the Golden Shovel (the shovel be golden but be ready to dig your grave). Here, Kavanagh adopts the voice of nature itself, and its innate innocence, as he describes the changing landscape. Yeats and Seamus Heaney there was Patrick Kavanagh, a brilliant poet paying attention to the everyday details of Irish life, taking in themes including youth and childhood. Not everyone would agree with Service, but he puts it wonderfully. To delve too deeply into science and knowledge is ‘folly’, not wisdom there is something to be said for remaining innocent. For the British-Canadian poet Robert William Service (1874-1958), the innocence of a child seemed to be the height of wisdom, as he explains in this short poem. Swains twice as Wicked Nymphs but half as sage ![]() The place where swains & nymphs are said to shine There Cicely Jeard by day the slips of NellĪre these the Virtues which adorn the plain While Ned was drinking Hodge & William dead Or safe with shepheards lys among the bowrs Singing at ease she roves ye field of flowrs Where cooling streams salute ye summer Seats Yet this poem deserves inclusion here as it’s a fine poem about innocence, written in the heroic couplets the Augustans like Swift and Pope were so fond of, and it’s short enough to be quoted in full: However, Parnell is now no longer remembered or mentioned in the same breath as Swift or Pope. Parnell (1679-1718) was an Anglo-Irish poet who was a friend of both Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift he was a member of their famous Scriblerus club with them. Thomas Parnell, ‘Oft Have I Read That Innocence Retreats’. The speaker laments the death of his daughter, a ‘precious pearl without a spot’, an innocent child who, through baptism, can be saved: We begin this selection of classic poems about innocence with a long dream-vision poem from the fourteenth century, composed by an unknown poet (although probably the same person who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). ![]() However, poems about innocence can be found before the 1790s and the arrival of Romanticism into English poetry, so below we’ve ranged far and wide in English verse to collect some of the greatest poems about being innocence, about states of innocence, and related themes.Īnonymous, Pearl. ![]() Innocence is a theme that looms large in English poetry, especially since the age of Romanticism. ![]()
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