Good poems
/ page 280 of 545 /
from Mercian Hymns
© Geoffrey Hill
I
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
pantoum: landing, 1976
© Evie Shockley
dreaming the lives of the ancestors,
you awake, justly terrified of this world:
In the Loop
© Richard Jones
I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
The Jew and the Rooster Are One
© Gerald Stern
After fighting with his dead brothers and his dead sisters
he chose to paint the dead rooster of his youth,
Harvest Song
© Jean Toomer
My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields
of other harvesters.
Sonnet CXXI: 'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed
© William Shakespeare
’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed
When not to be receives reproach of being,
Fifteen Epitaphs I
© Louise Imogen Guiney
I laid the strewings, darling, on thine urn;
I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis.
Now hushaby, my little child, and learn
Long sleep how good it is.
This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
To Rosa
© Abraham Lincoln
You are young, and I am older;
You are hopeful, I am not
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder
Pluck the roses ere they rot.
Modern Love: XVI
© George Meredith
In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,
When in the firelight steadily aglow,
Hellas: Chorus
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
Boundary Issues
© John Ashbery
Here in life, they would understand.
How could it be otherwise? We had groped too,
unwise, till the margin began to give way,
at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both.
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
Ars Poetica?
© Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
The Bamboo Ladder
© Pierre Reverdy
There once was a bamboo ladder.
It reached up to the sky.
And the Japanese man
Did tricks on the ladder
And said what a good man am I.
The School Where I Studied
© John Wesley
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
© Geoffrey Hill
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.
