Age poems
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Flower-De-Luce: Giotto's Tower
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How many lives, made beautiful and sweet
By self-devotion and by self-restraint,
The Sorcerer: Act I
© William Schwenck Gilbert
For to-day young Alexis-young Alexis Pointdextre
Is betrothed to Aline-to Aline Sangazure,
And that pride of his sex is-of his sex is to be next her
At the feast on the green-on the green, oh, be sure!
The Test of Fantasy
© Joanne Kyger
It unfolds and ripples like a banner, downward. All the stories
come folding out. The smells and flowers begin to come back, as
the tapestry is brightly colored and brocaded. Rabbits and violets.
Bird Parliament (translation of)
© Edward Fitzgerald
And first, with Heart so full as from his Eyes
Ran weeping, up rose Tajidar the Wise;
The mystic Mark upon whose Bosom show'd
That He alone of all the Birds THE ROAD
Had travell'd: and the Crown upon his Head
Had reach'd the Goal; and He stood forth and said:
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
The Shepherds Calendar - May
© John Clare
Come queen of months in company
Wi all thy merry minstrelsy
The restless cuckoo absent long
And twittering swallows chimney song
Love, Death, And Reputation
© Anne Kingsmill Finch
Reputation, Love, and Death,
(The Last all Bones, the First all Breath,
from Venus and Adonis
© William Shakespeare
Even as the sunne with purple-colourd face,
Had tane his last leaue of the weeping morne,
Rose-cheekt Adonis hied him to the chace,
Hunting he lou'd, but loue he laught to scorne,
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amaine vnto him,
And like a bold fac'd suter ginnes to woo him.
For the Tattooed Man by Sharmila Voorakkara: American Life in Poetry #167 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laur
© Ted Kooser
and each pinned and martyred limb aches for more.
Her memory wraps you like a vise.
How simple the pain that trails and graces
the length of your body. How it fans, blazes,
writes itself over in the blood's tightening sighs,
bruises into wisdom you have no name for.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2005 by Sharmila Voorakkara, whose most recent book of poetry is âFire Wheel,â? Univ. of Akron Press, 2003. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Ave Atque Vale
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
In Memory of Charles Baudelaire
Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs;
Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
from The Bridge: Quaker Hill
© Hart Crane
Above them old Mizzentop, palatial white
Hostelry—floor by floor to cinquefoil dormer
Portholes the ceilings stack their stoic height.
Long tiers of windows staring out toward former
Faces—loose panes crown the hill and gleam
At sunset with a silent, cobwebbed patience . . .
The Old Man Drew the Line
© Carl Rakosi
Ah, companero,
you were born
on the wrong day
when God was paradoxical.
You’ll have to
find yourself an old dog.
Written In Montaignes Essays. Given To The Duke Of Shrewsbury In France, After The Peace
© Matthew Prior
Dictate, O mighty judge, what thou hast seen
Of cities and of courts, of books and men,
And deign to let thy servant hold the pen.
Commemoration
© Sir Henry Newbolt
I sat by the granite pillar, and sunlight fell
Where the sunlight fell of old,
And the hour was the hour my heart remembered well,
And the sermon rolled and rolled
As it used to roll when the place was still unhaunted,
And the strangest tale in the world was still untold.
Your Hay it is Mow'd, and Your Corn is Reaped
© John Dryden
COMUS
Your hay it is mow'd, and your corn is reap'd;
Your barns will be full, and your hovels heap'd:
Come, my boys, come;
Come, my boys, come;
And merrily roar out Harvest Home.
Machinist Talking
© Lesbia Harford
I sit at my machine,
Hour long beside me Vera aged nineteen,
Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.
Antrim
© Robinson Jeffers
No spot of earth where men have so fiercely for ages of time
Fought and survived and cancelled each other,
My Country
© James Montgomery
Man, through all ages of revolving time,
Unchanging man, in every varying clime,
Deems his own land of every land the pride,
Beloved by Heaven o'er the world beside;
His home the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.
