Freedom poems
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You Ask Me, Why, Tho' Ill at Ease
© Alfred Tennyson
You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.
Song of the Open Road
© Walt Whitman
1
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
1914 II. Safety
© Rupert Brooke
Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Sonnet XII: I did but Prompt the Age to Quit their Clogs
© Patrick Kavanagh
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
The Columbiad: Book VIII
© Joel Barlow
On fame's high pinnacle their names shall shine,
Unending ages greet the group divine,
Whose holy hands our banners first unfurl'd,
And conquer'd freedom for the grateful world.
Gitanjali 35
© Anselm Hollo
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
An Elegy
© Benjamin Jonson
THOUGH beauty be the mark of praise,
And yours of whom I sing be such
As not the world can praise too much,
Yet 'tis your Virtue now I raise.
The New Year. Rosh-Hashanah, 5643
© Emma Lazarus
Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled,
And naked branches point to frozen skies,-
When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold,
The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn
A sea of beauty and abundance lies,
Then the new year is born.
Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Think not this paper comes with vain pretense
To move your pity, or to mourn th offense.
Omar Khayyam
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
READING in Omar till the thoughts that burned
Upon his pages seemed to be inurned
Within me in a silent fire, my pen
By instinct to his flowing metre turned.
To a Highland Girl
© André Breton
(At Inversneyde, upon Loch Lomond)
Sweet Highland Girl, a very shower
The American Soldier
© Philip Morin Freneau
A Picture from the Life
To serve with love,
And shed your blood,
Approved may be above,
To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth
© Phillis Wheatley
Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
Eliza Harris
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Like a fawn from the arrow, startled and wild,
A woman swept by us, bearing a child;
In her eye was the night of a settled despair,
And her brow was o’ershaded with anguish and care.
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
The Prime of Life
© Henry Lawson
OH, the strength of the toil of those twenty years, with father, and master, and men!
And the clearer brain of the business man, who has held his own for ten:
Oh, the glorious freedom from business fears, and the rest from domestic strife!
The past is dead, and the future assured, and Im in the prime of life!
The Retinue
© Katharine Lee Bates
Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Austrian Heir-Apparent,
Rideth through the Shadow Land, not a lone knight errant,
But captain of a mighty train, millions upon millions,
Armies of the battle-slain, hordes of dim civilians;
