The Poet Within

Poetry acts upon the creative soul like fire touched to tinder. The elegant phrases inspired by genius can make the dry places of the heart burn with brilliant thoughts or startling concepts. Read the following excerpts, then write, without conscious thought, whatever comes to mind. It may surprise you what gorgeous script flows from your pen onto the page.

No man is an island, entire of itself;

Each man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were,

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved with mankind;

And, therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or, bends with the remover to remove:

Oh, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Shakespeare

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song…

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass…

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.

Born of the sun, they traveled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Stephen Spender

The poet within each writer feeds on inspired words from glorious literary lights like Byron, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson. Nourish your heart with their lyrical wisdom and your writing will abound with beauty and meaning.