Good poems
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If Death Be Good
© Bliss William Carman
(Sappho LXXIV)
If death be good,
Why do the gods not die?
If life be ill,
Curtius
© Isabella Valancy Crawford
Why, love, how darkly gaze thine eyes in mine!
If loved I dismal thoughts I well could deem
Thou sawest not the blue of my fond eyes,
But looked between the lips of that dread pit,-
O Jove! to name it seems to curse the air
With chills of death! We'll speak not of it, Curtius.
The Lament of Toby, The Learned Pig
© Thomas Hood
Oh, heavy day! oh, day of woe!
To misery a poster,
Why was I ever farrowed, why
Not spitted for a roaster?
The Wanderer: A Vision: Canto IV
© Richard Savage
Still o'er my mind wild Fancy holds her sway,
Still on strange visionary land I stray.
Now scenes crowd thick! now indistinct appear!
Swift glide the months, and turn the varying year!
At Sugar Camp
© Edgar Albert Guest
At Sugar Camp the cook is kind
And laughs the laugh we knew as boys;
The Giaour: A Fragment Of A Turkish Tale
© George Gordon Byron
No breath of air to break the wave
That rolls below the Athenian's grave,
That tomb which, gleaming o'er the cliff
First greets the homeward-veering skiff
High o'er the land he saved in vain;
When shall such Hero live again?
To The Countess Of Bedford I
© John Donne
Therefore I study you first in your saints,
Those friends whom your election glorifies ;
Then in your deeds, accesses and restraints,
And what you read, and what yourself devise.
School Rhymes
© James Clerk Maxwell
O academic muse that hast for long
Charmed all the world with thy disciples song,
As myrtle bushes must give place to trees,
Our humbler strains can now no longer please.
Look down for once, inspire me in these lays.
In lofty verse to sing our Rector's praise.
The Passing Year
© Mathilde Blind
There is a pathos in his softening glow,
Which like a benediction seems to hover
O'er the tranced earth, ere he must sink below
And leave her widowed of her radiant Lover,
A frost-bound sleeper in a shroud of snow,
While winter winds howl a wild dirge above her.
Grand Chorus Of Birds
© Aristophanes
Come on then, ye dwellers by nature in darkness, and like to the
leaves' generations,
Green Rock, Winthrop Bay
© Sylvia Plath
No lame excuses can gloss over
Barge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked pier.
I should have known better.
Rubens
© Harriet Monroe
It was a rich old gorgeous world you painted &mdash
For kinds or prelates, what mattered! &mdash palace or church!
You had a wonderful, glorious time! &mdash
And no doubt the ladies loved you.
The Devil's Walk. A Ballad
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
Once, early in the morning, Beelzebub arose,
With care his sweet person adorning,
He put on his Sunday clothes.
On Sanazar's Being Honoured With Six hundred Duckets By The
© Richard Lovelace
Twas a blith prince exchang'd five hundred crowns
For a fair turnip. Dig, dig on, O clowns
But how this comes about, Fates, can you tell,
This more then Maid of Meurs, this miracle?
Strange That The Godless Prosper
© Sophocles
STRANGE is it that the godless, who have sprung
From evil-doers, should fare prosperously,
An Elegy Upon The Death Of Dr. Donne, Dean Of Paul's
© Thomas Carew
Here lies a king, that rul'd as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lie two flamens, and both those, the best,
Apollo's first, at last, the true God's priest.
