Famous poems
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Ox Tamer, The.
© Walt Whitman
IN a faraway northern county, in the placid, pastoral region,
Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous Tamer of Oxen:
There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds, to break them;
He will take the wildest steer in the world, and break him and tame him;
Song of the Exposition.
© Walt Whitman
1
AFTER all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free;
Sleepers, The.
© Walt Whitman
1
I WANDER all night in my vision,
Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,
Passage to India.
© Walt Whitman
1
SINGING my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,
When I read the Book.
© Walt Whitman
WHEN I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a mans life?
And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life;
The old pond
© Matsuo Basho
Following are several translations
of the 'Old Pond' poem, which may be
the most famous of all haiku:
Cuchulain Comforted
© William Butler Yeats
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.
Three Songs To The One Burden
© William Butler Yeats
IThe Roaring Tinker if you like,
But Mannion is my name,
And I beat up the common sort
And think it is no shame.
A Satyre on Charles II
© John Wilmot
[Rochester had to flee the court for several months
after handing this to the King by mistake.]
In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
Signior Dildo
© John Wilmot
You ladies of merry England
Who have been to kiss the Duchess's hand,
Pray, did you not lately observe in the show
A noble Italian called Signior Dildo?
On Winter's Margin
© Mary Oliver
On winters margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globes broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.
The Proud Lady
© Henry Van Dyke
When Stiivoren town was in its prime
And queened the Zuyder Zee,
Its ships went out to every clime
With costly merchantry.
Father Explains
© Czeslaw Milosz
"There where that ray touches the plain
And the shadows escape as if they really ran,
Warsaw stands, open from all sides,
A city not very old but quite famous.
An Alphabet of Famous Goops
© Gelett Burgess
AN ALPHABET OF FAMOUS GOOPS.
Which you 'll Regard with Yells and Whoops.
Futile Acumen!
For you Yourselves are Doubtless Dupes
Of Failings Such as Mar these Groups --
We all are Human!
Yarrow Visited. September, 1814
© André Breton
And is this—Yarrow?—This the stream
Of which my fancy cherished,
The Dictionary of Silence
© Debora Greger
And in that city the houses of the dead
are left empty, if the dead are famous enough;
by day the living pay to see if dust is all
that befalls the lives they left behind.
How to Get There
© Philip Levine
Turn left off Henry onto Middagh Street
to see our famous firehouse, home
of Engine 205 and
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.
