Freedom poems
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The Saturday Night Song
© Julian Tuwim
Hooray, the echo will resound throughout the wide square,
When a sincere drunkard's song emanates from my throat;
Tonight I'll be lapping up a smoky pub's atmosphere,
I'm bloody well going to get sloshed, buzzed and somewhere float.
Memory
© Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev
Only snakes shed their skin,
So their souls can age and grow.
We, alas, do not resemble snakes,
We change souls, not bodies.
The Bride Of The Nile - Act II
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Belkís. I cannot do these sums
So long before the date. In the meanwhile talk to me.
I want to be amused. Life will go drearily
If we are to be like this. Let us play at something--chess,
Or draughts, or dominoes. Ask me a thing to guess--
An intellectual game.
To the Queen at Oxford
© Henry King
Great Lady! That thus quite against our use,
We speak your welcome by an English Muse,
And in a vulgar tongue our zeales contrive,
Is to confess your large prerogative,
In Summer
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, summer has clothed the earth
In a cloak from the loom of the sun!
And a mantle, too, of the skies' soft blue,
And a belt where the rivers run.
I Bless You, Forests
© Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
I bless my staff and my humble rags.
And the steppe from beginning to end,
And the sun's light, and night's darkness,
Charleston At The Close Of 1863
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
WHAT! still does the mother of treason uprear
Her crest 'gainst the furies that darken her sea,
Unquelled by mistrust, and unblanched by a fear,
Unbowed her proud head, and unbending her knee,
Calm, steadfast and free!
Seed-Time And Harvest
© John Greenleaf Whittier
As o'er his furrowed fields which lie
Beneath a coldly dropping sky,
Yet chill with winter's melted snow,
The husbandman goes forth to sow,
The Three Christmas Waits
© William Makepeace Thackeray
"When this black year began,
This Eighteen-forty-eight,
I was a great great man,
And king both vise and great,
And Munseer Guizot by me did show
As Minister of State.
The King's Missive
© John Greenleaf Whittier
UNDER the great hill sloping bare
To cove and meadow and Common lot,
An Ode - Humbly Inscribed To The Queen, On the Glorious Success of Her Majesty's Arms
© Matthew Prior
When great Augustus govern'd ancient Rome,
And sent his conquering bands to foreign wars,
The Course Of Life
© Friedrich Hölderlin
You too wanted better things, but love
forces all of us down. Sorrow bends us more
forcefully, but the arc doesn't return to its
point of origin without a reason.
The Ocean Liner
© Peter McArthur
All day with headlong and undoubting haste,
And all the night upon her path she flames
Like some weird shape from olden errantry;
And when some wafted wanderer of the waste
A storm-worn pennant dips afar, proclaims
With raucous voice her strong supremacy.
The Last Room
© Bliss William Carman
THERE, close the door!
I shall not need these lodgings any more.
Now that I go, dismantled wall and floor
Reproach me and deplore.
The Realm Of Rest
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
In the realm that Nature boundeth
Are there balmy shores of peace,
Where no passion-torrent soundeth,
And no storm-wind seeks release?
America for Me
© Henry Van Dyke
'Tis fine to see the Old World and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues and kings
But now I think I've had enough of antiquated things.
Ourselves Alone
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
"Oh, why drive me forth from your hearth into exile
And into far dangers? Your house is my own.
Faithful I serve, as I ever did serve you,
Standing together, ourselvesand alone."
The Prisoners Of Naples
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I HAVE been thinking of the victims bound
In Naples, dying for the lack of air
And sunshine, in their close, damp cells of pain,
Where hope is not, and innocence in vain
