Philippine Literatures

You Ask me for Verses
by Jose Rizal

You bid me now to strike the lyre,
That mute and torn so long has lain:
And yet I cannot wake the strain,
Nor will the Muse one note inspire!
Coldly it shakes in accenta dire,
As if my soul itself to wring,
And when its sound seems but to fling
A jest at its own low lament;
So in sad isolation pent,
My soul can neither feel nor sing.

There was a time-ah, 't is too

...

The Song of the Traveller
by Jose Rizal

Like to a leaf that is fallen and withered,
Tossed by the tempest from pole unto pole ;
hus roams the pilgrim abroad without purpose,
Roams without love, without country or soul.

Following anxiously treacherous fortune,
Fortune which e 'en as he grasps at it flees ;
Vain though the hopes that his yearning is seeking,
Yet does the pilgrim embark on the seas !

Ever

...

To the Philippine Youth
by Jose Rizal

Hold high the brow serene,
O youth, where now you stand;
Let the bright sheen
Of your grace be seen,
Fair hope of my fatherland!

Come now, thou genius grand,
And bring down inspiration;
With thy mighty hand,
Swifter than the wind's violation,
Raise the eager mind to higher station.

Come down with pleasing light
Of art and science to the fight,

...

Landscape with Figures

Carlos Bulosan

Homeward again under foreign stars,

history was a strange gush of wind from memory

that came to echo waterfalls of those years:

home to find the place lost among

galaxies of signs. The hills were gone. The river

trail was forgotten. . . Trying to remember meadowlark

and those who perished in the vanishing land

(bones in the

...

To The Philippines by Dr. Jose Rizal
(Rizal wrote the original sonnet in Spanish)

A glowing and fair like a houri on high,
Full of grace and pure like the Morn that peeps
When in the sky the clouds are tinted blue,
Of th' Indian land, a goddess sleeps.

The light foam of the son'rous sea
Doth kiss her feet with loving desire;
The cultured West adores her smile
And the frosty Pole her flow'red attire.

With

...