The Noble Nature

Ben Jonson

 
     It is not growing like a tree
     In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
          A lily of a day         
          Is fairer far in May,
     Although it fall and die that night—
     It was the plant and flower of Light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.
 

Poems by This Author

A Hymn on the Nativity of My Savior by Ben Jonson
I sing the birth was born tonight
An Ode to Himself by Ben Jonson
Where dost thou careless lie
Epigrams: On my First Son by Ben Jonson
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy
His Excuse for Loving by Ben Jonson
Let it not your wonder move,
My Picture Left in Scotland by Ben Jonson
I now think love is rather deaf, than blind,
On My First Son by Ben Jonson
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
On Poet-Ape by Ben Jonson
Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Song to Celia by Ben Jonson
Drinke to me, onely, with thine eys
Third Charm from Masque of Queens by Ben Jonson
The owl is abroad, the bat, and the toad


Further Reading

Poems About the Natural World
And the Intrepid Anthurium
by Pura López-Colomé
Belong To
by David Baker
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
Crossings
by Ravi Shankar
Farewell
by John Clare
February: The Boy Breughel
by Norman Dubie
Field
by Erin Belieu
Fish Fucking
by Michael Blumenthal
For-The-Spirits-Who-Have-Rounded-The-Bend IIVAQSAAT
by dg nanouk okpik
Four Poems for Robin
by Gary Snyder
God's World
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
In a Blue Wood
by Richard Levine
In Michael Robins’s class minus one
by Bob Hicok
Kentucky River Junction
by Wendell Berry
maggie and milly and molly and may
by E. E. Cummings
Naskeag
by Alfred Corn
October (section I)
by Louise Glück
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
by William Wordsworth
Of Many Worlds in This World
by Margaret Cavendish
Pastoral
by Jennifer Chang
Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Poppies on the Wheat
by Helen Hunt Jackson
Russian Birch
by Nathaniel Bellows
Song of Nature
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spontaneous Me
by Walt Whitman
The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy
The Gladness of Nature
by William Cullen Bryant
The Leaves
by Deborah Digges
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
by Ezra Pound
The Wind and the Moon
by George Macdonald
Trees
by Joyce Kilmer
Two Butterflies went out at Noon— (533)
by Emily Dickinson
Winter Morning
by William Jay Smith
Work Without Hope
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge