Cool poems
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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.
Bologna: A Poem About Gold
© James Wright
She looks like only the heavy deep gold
That drags thrones down
All day long on the vine.
Mary in Bologna, sunlight I gathered all morning
And pressed in my hands all afternoon
And drank all day with my golden-breasted
The Bathers
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Hither, from thirsty day
And stifling labour and the street's hot glare,
To twilight shut away
Beyond the soft roar, under hovering trees,
Campus Sonnets: Before An Examination
© Stephen Vincent Benet
The breeze blows cool and there are stars and stars
Beyond the dark, soft masses of the elms
That whisper things in windy tones and light.
They seem to wheel for dim, celestial wars;
And I - I hear the clash of silver helms
Ring icy-clear from the far deeps of night.
Special Treatments Ward
© Dana Gioia
I put this poem aside twelve years ago
because I could not bear remembering
the faces it evoked, and every line
seemed—still seems—so inadequate and grim.
Hartley Field
© Connie Wanek
And you, whom I have heard breathe all night,
sigh through the water of sleep
with vestigial gills . . .
Cold Calls: War Music, Continued
© Christopher Logue
Take Quinamid
The son of a Dardanian astrologer
Who disregarded what his father said
And came to Troy in a taxi.
A Summer Wish
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Live all thy sweet life through,
Sweet Rose, dew-sprent,
Galatea
© Henry Kendall
A SILVER slope, a fall of firs, a league of gleaming grasses,
And fiery cones, and sultry spurs, and swarthy pits and passes!
The Frogs
© Archibald Lampman
Often to me who heard you in your day,
With close wrapt ears, it could not choose but seem
That earth, our mother, searching in that way,
Men's hearts might know her spirit's inmost dream,
Ever at rest beneath life's change and stir,
Made you her soul, and bade you pipe for her.
The Owl and The Bell
© George MacDonald
Bing, Bim, Bang, Bome!
Sang the Bell to himself in his house at home,
High in the church-tower, lone and unseen,
In a twilight of ivy, cool and green;
With his Bing, Bing, Bim, Bing, Bang, Bome!
Singing bass to himself in his house at home.
The Child Of The Islands - Summer
© Caroline Norton
I.
FOR Summer followeth with its store of joy;
That, too, can bring thee only new delight;
Its sultry hours can work thee no annoy,
The Executive’s Death
© Robert Bly
Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.
Half the population are like the long grasshoppers
The Crystal Lithium
© James Schuyler
The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach
Eve-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all
Moon From the Porch
© Annie Finch
Moon has dusks for walls,
October’s days for a floor,
crickets for rooms, windy halls.
Only one night is her door.
