Experience poems
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The Dunciad: Book II.
© Alexander Pope
Not with more glee, by hands Pontific crown'd,
With scarlet hats wide-waving circled round,
Rome in her Capitol saw Querno sit,
Throned on seven hills, the Antichrist of wit.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt. Canto I.
© George Gordon Byron
Nay, smile not at my sullen brow,
Alas! I cannot smile again:
Yet Heaven avert that ever thou
Shouldst weep, and haply weep in vain.
To The Honourable Charles Montague, Esq.
© Matthew Prior
Howe'er, 'tis well that, while mankind
Through fate's perverse meander errs,
He can imagined pleasures find
To combat against real cares.
Horace: Book II. Ode 9
© Samuel Johnson
Clouds do not always veil the skies,
Nor showers immerse the verdant plain;
Nor do the billows always rise,
Or storms afflict the ruffled main.
How Are You Doing? by Rick Snyder: American Life in Poetry #103 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-
© Ted Kooser
One of the ways a poet makes art from his or her experience is through the use of unique, specific and particular detail. This poem by Rick Snyder thrives on such details. It's not just baseball caps, it's Tasmanian Devil caps; it's not just music on the intercom, it's James Taylor. And Snyder's poem also caught my interest with the humor of its flat, sardonic tone.
How Are You Doing?
The Princess (part 7)
© Alfred Tennyson
'If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream,
I would but ask you to fulfil yourself:
But if you be that Ida whom I knew,
I ask you nothing: only, if a dream,
Sweet dream, be perfect. I shall die tonight.
Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die.'
The Sorrows of a Simple Bard
© Henry Lawson
WHEN I tell a tale of virtue and of injured innocence,
Then my publishers and lawyers are the densest of the dense:
With the blank face of an image and the nod of keep-it-dark
And a wink of mighty meaning at their confidential clerk.
Tale XV
© George Crabbe
transgress'd,
And while the anger kindled in his breast,
The pain must be endured that could not be
Abhangs (A Short Collection)
© Sant Tukaram
I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
"Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time," Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
"Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility."
Solomon on the Vanity of the World, A Poem. In Three Books. - Knowledge. Book I.
© Matthew Prior
But, O! ere yet original man was made,
Ere the foundations of this earth were laid,
It was opponent to our search ordain'd,
That joy still sought should never be attain'd:
This sad experience cites me to reveal,
And what I dictate is from what I feel.
Up And Down The Lanes Of Love
© Edgar Albert Guest
UP and down the lanes of love,
With the bright blue skies above,
Satyr IX. The State Of Love Imitated Fm An Elegy Of Mons:r Desportes
© Thomas Parnell
Hence lett us hence with Just abhorrence go
for ill their happyness these mortalls know
Who slight the mighty favours I bestow
To Arthur Upson
© William Stanley Braithwaite
How placidly this silent river rolls
Under the midnight stars before our feet,
A Problem In Dynamics
© James Clerk Maxwell
An inextensible heavy chain
Lies on a smooth horizontal plane,
An impulsive force is applied at A,
Required the initial motion of K.
Mingus At The Showplace
© William Matthews
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen
and so I swung into action and wrote a poemand it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience shatliterature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th st., and I sat at the bar,casting beer money from a reel of ones,
Misgivings
© William Matthews
"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,
The Lay Of St. Odille
© Richard Harris Barham
Odille was a maid of a dignified race;
Her father, Count Otto, was lord of Alsace;
