Freedom poems
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A Marching Song
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
We mix from many lands,
We march for very far;
In hearts and lips and hands
Our staffs and weapons are;
The light we walk in darkens sun and moon and star.
Siena
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Inside this northern summer's fold
The fields are full of naked gold,
Broadcast from heaven on lands it loves;
The green veiled air is full of doves;
Christmas Antiphones
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Thou whose birth on earth
Angels sang to men,
While thy stars made mirth,
Saviour, at thy birth,
This day born again;
Before A Crucifix
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Here, down between the dusty trees,
At this lank edge of haggard wood,
Women with labour-loosened knees,
With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,
Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare
Forth with souls easier for the prayer.
Tiresias
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
It is an hour before the hour of dawn.
Set in mine hand my staff and leave me here
Outside the hollow house that blind men fear,
More blind than I who live on life withdrawn
And feel on eyes that see not but foresee
The shadow of death which clothes Antigone.
Hertha
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
I AM that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.
A Watch In The Night
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Watchman, what of the night? -
Storm and thunder and rain,
Lights that waver and wane,
Leaving the watchfires unlit.
To Walt Whitman In America
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Send but a song oversea for us,
Heart of their hearts who are free,
Heart of their singer, to be for us
More than our singing can be;
Song 2
© Anne Brontë
Shout you that will, and you that can rejoice
To revel in the riches of your foes.
In praise of deadly vengeance lift you voice,
Gloat o'er your tyrants' blood, you victims' woes.
I'd rather listen to the skylarks' songs,
And think on Gondal's, and my Father's wrongs.
A Prisoner in a Dungeon Deep
© Anne Brontë
No, he has lived so long enthralled
Alone in dungeon gloom
That he has lost regret and hope,
Has ceased to mourn his doom.
The Choice (The American Spirit Speaks)
© Rudyard Kipling
To the Judge of Right and Wrong
With Whom fulfillment lies
Our purpose and our power belong,
Our faith and sacrifice.
Scars on Paper
© Marilyn Hacker
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
He "Digesteth Harde Yron"
© Marianne Clarke Moore
is not more suspicious.How
could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young
used even as a riding-beast, respect men
hiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand
making the neck move as if alive
and from a bag the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches
Song of A Poor Pilgrim
© George MacDonald
Roses all the rosy way!
Roses to the rosier west
Where the roses of the day
Cling to night's unrosy breast!
Song For The Luddites
© George Gordon Byron
I.
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
Within The Gate
© John Greenleaf Whittier
L. M. C.
We sat together, last May-day, and talked
Of the dear friends who walked
Beside us, sharers of the hopes and fears
Of five and forty years,
Libertatis Sacra Fames
© Oscar Wilde
For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reign
Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade,
Save Treason and the dagger of her trade,
And Murder with his silent bloody feet.
Spanish Peasant
© Robert William Service
We have no aspiration vain
For paradise Utopian,
And here in our sun-happy Spain,
Though man exploit his fellow man,
