Good poems
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Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
© André Breton
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
[My prime of youth is but a frost of cares]
© Chidiock Tichborne
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Inscription for a Gravestone
© Robinson Jeffers
I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Blue Ridge
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
Up there on the mountain road, the fireworks
blistered and subsided, for once at eye level:
They Clapped
© Nikki Giovanni
they clapped when they took off
for home despite the dead
dream they saw a free future
Miriam Tazewell
© Pindar
When Miriam Tazewell heard the tempest bursting
And his wrathy whips across the sky drawn crackling
She stuffed her ears for fright like a young thing
And with heart full of the flowers took to weeping.
Buick
© Ishmael Reed
As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.
The Seekonk Woods
© Washington Allston
When first I walked here I hobbled
along ties set too close together
from Totem Poem [In the yellow time of pollen]
© Luke Davies
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs,
in the green that would balance on the wide green world,
They Sit Together on the Porch
© Wendell Berry
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
from Queen Mab: Part VI
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
(excerpt)
"Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,
A Roundelay between Two Shepherds
© Michael Drayton
1 Shep. Tell me, thou gentle shepherd swain,
Whos yonder in the vale is set?
2 Shep. Oh, it is she, whose sweets do stain
The lily, rose, the violet!
Late March
© Edward Hirsch
Saturday morning in late March.
I was alone and took a long walk,
though I also carried a book
of the Alone, which companioned me.
My Brother, the Artist, at Seven
© Philip Levine
As a boy he played alone in the fields
behind our block, six frame houses
The Loneliness of the Military Historian
© Margaret Atwood
But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
The Lady’s Dressing Room
© Jonathan Swift
Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
[The Doleful Lay of Clorinda]
© Mary Sidney Herbert
Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain,
That may compassion my impatient grief?
“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.”
© Anthony Evan Hecht
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
The Disabled Debauchee
© John Wilmot
As some brave admiral, in former war
Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,
Two rival fleets appearing from afar,
Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill;
