Freedom poems
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The Landmarks
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I.
THROUGH the streets of Marblehead
Fast the red-winged terror sped;
To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth
© Phillis Wheatley
Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
So Cruel Prison
© Henry Howard
So cruel prison how could betide, alas,
As proud Windsor? Where I in lust and joy
New Morality
© George Canning
But say,-indignant does the Muse retire,
Her shrine deserted, and extinct its fire?
No pious hand to feed the sacred flame,
No raptured soul a Poet's charge to claim.
A Song Of Impossibilities
© Winthrop Mackworth Praed
LADY, I loved you all last year,
How honestly and well --
Report From The Besieged City
© Zbigniew Herbert
I am supposed to be exact but I don't know when the invasion began
two hundred years ago in December in September perhaps yesterday at dawn
everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time
Nature The Consoler
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
GLADLY I hail these solitudes, and breathe
The inspiring breath of the fresh woodland air,
Most gladly to the past alone bequeath
Doubt, grief, and care;
Elegy XIX. - Written in Spring, 1743
© William Shenstone
Again the labouring hind inverts the soil;
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave;
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
And finds me vacant in the rural cave.
Lara. A Tale
© George Gordon Byron
Proud Otho on the instant, reddening, threw
His glove on earth, and forth his sabre flew.
"The last alternative befits me best,
And thus I answer for mine absent guest."
The Triumph Of Fashion
© Henry James Pye
She spoke, and while her voice the war defy'd,
Assembling myriads croud on every side;
Undaunted to the field of death they go,
And frown amazement on the approaching foe:
With dreadful shock the encount'ring armies meet,
And the plain trembling, rocks beneath their feet.
Through Liberty To Light
© Alfred Austin
Fixed is my Faith, the lingering dawn despite,
That still we move through Liberty to Light.
The Human Tragedy.
For The Commemoration Services
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
FOUR summers coined their golden light in leaves,
Four wasteful autumns flung them to the gale,
Four winters wore the shroud the tempest weaves,
The fourth wan April weeps o'er hill and vale;
Instinct
© Cesare Pavese
From the door of his house in the gentle sunshine
the old man, disillusioned with everything,
watches the dog and the bitch as they follow instinct.
Tale I
© George Crabbe
THE DUMB ORATORS; OR THE BENEFIT OF SOCIETY.
That all men would be cowards if they dare,
On The Death Of Pushkin
© Mikhail Lermontov
"Hence is he, hence! His song out-rung,
The Singer even as the song he sung;
Who of a hot, heroic mood,
In death disgraceful shed his blood!"
Found Letter by Joshua Weiner: American Life in Poetry #123 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
There is a type of poem, the Found Poem, that records an author's discovery of the beauty that occasionally occurs in the everyday discourse of others. Such a poem might be words scrawled on a wadded scrap of paper, or buried in the classified ads, or on a billboard by the road. The poet makes it his or her poem by holding it up for us to look at. Here the Washington, D.C., poet Joshua Weiner directs us to the poetry in a letter written not by him but to him.
Naples 1860
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I GIVE thee joy!I know to thee
The dearest spot on earth must be
Where sleeps thy loved one by the summer sea;
