Beauty poems

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The Poster Girl’s Defence

© Carolyn Wells

It was an Artless Poster Girl pinned up against my wall,
She was tremendous ugly, she was exceeding tall;
I was gazing at her idly, and I think I must have slept,
For that poster maiden lifted up her poster voice, and wept.

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When Thou Must Home to Shades of Underground

© Thomas Campion

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arriv'd, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finish'd love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

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A Poem on the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

© Nikki Giovanni

Trees are never felled . . . in summer . . . Not when the fruit . . . 
is yet to be borne . . . Never before the promise . . . is fulfilled . . . 
Not when their cooling shade . . . has yet to comfort . . .

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The Time I’ve Lost in Wooing

© Thomas Moore

The time I’ve lost in wooing,

In watching and pursuing

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The Two Children

© Emily Jane Brontë

Heavy hangs the raindrop
From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On uplands far away;

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Sway

© Louis Simpson

Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye
Everyone at Lake Kearney had a nickname: 
there was a Bumstead, a Tonto, a Tex, 
and, from the slogan of a popular orchestra, 
two sisters, Swing and Sway.

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Credo

© Robinson Jeffers

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum


And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting

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At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans

© Larry Levis

I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover 
From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now,
Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled,
Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out
Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A.

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A Celebration of Charis: IV. Her Triumph

© Benjamin Jonson

See the chariot at hand here of Love,


 Wherein my lady rideth!

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Joy in the Woods

© Claude McKay

There is joy in the woods just now,

  The leaves are whispers of song,

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Granddaughter

© Robinson Jeffers

And here’s a portrait of my granddaughter Una


When she was two years old: a remarkable painter,

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)

© Samuel Taylor Coleridge

How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

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The Book of Hours

© Boris Pasternak

Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons 

hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled 

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Amoretti VIII: More then most faire, full of the living fire

© Edmund Spenser

More then most faire, full of the living fire,


Kindled above unto the maker neere:

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The Southern Refugee

© George Moses Horton

What sudden ill the world await,

  From my dear residence I roam;

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Perspectives

© Ronald Stuart Thomas

They were bearded
like the sea they came
from; rang stone bells
for their stone hearers.

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A Prayer for My Daughter

© William Butler Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid 

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid 

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The Artist

© Amy Lowell

Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples? 

Why do you dim yourself with folded silks?

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"I saw my Lady weep"

© Pierre Reverdy

I saw my Lady weep,
And Sorrow proud to be advanced so
In those fair eyes, where all perfections keep;
  Her face was full of woe,
But such a woe (believe me) as wins more hearts
Than mirth can do, with her enticing parts.