Famous poems
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Beowulf (modern English translation)
© Pierre Reverdy
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
Mary Shelley in Brigantine
© Stephen Dunn
Because the ostracized experience the world
in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it
clearly yet with such anger and longing
that they sometimes enlarge what they see,
she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.
She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.
The Men
© Pablo Neruda
The era's beginning: are these ruined shacks,
these poor schools, these people still in rags and tatters,
this cloddish insecurity of my poor families,
is all this the day? the century's beginning, the golden door?
Paradise Regain'd: Book II (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
MEan while the new-baptiz'd, who yet remain'd
At Jordan with the Baptist, and had seen
Forgetfulness
© Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
from The Shepheardes Calender: October
© Edmund Spenser
The dapper ditties, that I wont devise,
To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry,
Delighten much: what I the bett for thy?
They han the pleasure, I a sclender prise.
I beate the bush, the byrds to them doe flye:
What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
Bird Parliament (translation of)
© Edward Fitzgerald
And first, with Heart so full as from his Eyes
Ran weeping, up rose Tajidar the Wise;
The mystic Mark upon whose Bosom show'd
That He alone of all the Birds THE ROAD
Had travell'd: and the Crown upon his Head
Had reach'd the Goal; and He stood forth and said:
Tom Deadlight (1810)
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnought, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'-wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought.
Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For Ive received orders for to sail for the Deadman,
But hope with the grand fleet to see you again.
Annie Protheroe. A Legend of Stratford-le-Bow
© William Schwenck Gilbert
OH! listen to the tale of little ANNIE PROTHEROE.
She kept a small post-office in the neighbourhood of BOW;
She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day -
A gentle executioner whose name was GILBERT CLAY.
The Supper
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Blind Roger
Set the glass in my hand. I'm blind and old,
But still I shun to be left in the cold.
Sonnet XXV: Let those who are in Favour with their Stars
© William Shakespeare
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
The Unthinkable
© Simon Armitage
A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,
its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 3. The Landlord's Tale; The Rhyme of Sir Christopher
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It was Sir Christopher Gardiner,
Knight of the Holy Sepulchre,
From Merry England over the sea,
Who stepped upon this continent
As if his august presence lent
A glory to the colony.
Coole Park 1929
© William Butler Yeats
I MEDITATE upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
from The Bridge: The Tunnel
© Hart Crane
Or can’t you quite make up your mind to ride;
A walk is better underneath the L a brisk
Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself
Preparing penguin flexions of the arms,—
As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:
The subway yawns the quickest promise home.
