Children poems
/ page 184 of 244 /
The Verdicts
© Rudyard Kipling
Not in the thick of the fight,
Not in the press of the odds,
Do the heroes come to their height,
Or we know the demi-gods.
To the True Romance
© Rudyard Kipling
Thy face is far from this our war,
Our call and counter-cry,
I shall not find Thee quick and kind,
Nor know Thee till I die,
Tomlinson
© Rudyard Kipling
Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair --
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
Generation To Generation
© Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes up
The Stranger
© Rudyard Kipling
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The Story of Ung
© Rudyard Kipling
Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.
Fashioned the form of a tribesman -- gaily he whistled and sung,
Working the snow with his fingers. Read ye the Story of Ung!
Song of the Wise Children
© Rudyard Kipling
When the darkened Fifties dip to the North,
And frost and the fog divide the air,
And the day is dead at his breaking-forth,
Sirs, it is bitter beneath the Bear!
The Song of the Sons
© Rudyard Kipling
One from the ends of the earth -- gifts at an open door --
Treason has much, but we, Mother, thy sons have more!
From the whine of a dying man, from the snarl of a wolf-pack freed,
Turn, and the world is thine. Mother, be proud of thy seed!
A Song of the English
© Rudyard Kipling
Fair is our lot -- O goodly is our heritage!
(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!)
For the Lord our God Most High
He hath made the deep as dry,
The Song of the Dead
© Rudyard Kipling
Hear now the Song of the Dead -- in the North by the torn berg-edges --
They that look still to the Pole, asleep by their hide-stripped sledges.
Song of the Dead in the South -- in the sun by their skeleton horses,
Where the warrigal whimpers and bays through the dust of the sere river-courses.
An Australian Paean1876
© Marcus Clarke
The English air is fresh and fair,
The Irish fields are green;
Nathan The Wise - Act IV
© Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
SCENE.--The Cloister of a Convent.
The FRIAR alone.
The Secret of the Machines
© Rudyard Kipling
We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive,
We can print and plough and weave and heat and light,
We can run and race and swim and fly and dive,
We can see and hear and count and read and write!
The Sea And the Hills
© Rudyard Kipling
1902
Who hath desired the Sea? -- the sight of salt wind-hounded --
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber win hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing --
The Sacrifice of Er-Heb
© Rudyard Kipling
Er-Heb beyond the Hills of Ao-Safai
Bears witness to the truth, and Ao-Safai
Hath told the men of Gorukh. Thence the tale
Comes westward o'er the peaks to India.
Bond Street
© Arthur Henry Adams
Its glittering emptiness it brings -
This little lane of useless things.
Here peering envy arm in arm
With ennui takes her saunterings.
The Return of the Children
© Rudyard Kipling
"They" -- Traffics and Discoveries
Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged races--
Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome,
Plucking the splendid robes of the passers-by, and with pitiful! faces
Begging what Princes and Powers refused:--"Ah, please will you let us go home?"
A Recantation
© Rudyard Kipling
What boots it on the Gods to call?
Since, answered or unheard,
We perish with the Gods and all
Things made--except the Word.
The Recall
© Rudyard Kipling
I am the land of their fathers,
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days.
