Good poems
/ page 281 of 545 /
from Odes: 14. Gin the Goodwife Stint
© Ted Hughes
The ploughland has gone to bent
and the pasture to heather;
gin the goodwife stint,
she’ll keep the house together.
A Visit from St. Nicholas
© Clement Clarke Moore
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The Song of the Wreck
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The wind blew high, the waters raved,
A ship drove on the land,
Soonest Mended
© John Ashbery
Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
Shroud of the Gnome
© James Tate
And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions
surprise or interest him, even a little. I tell him
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
© Charles Bukowski
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein’s
Thoughtless Cruelty
© Charles Lamb
There, Robert, you have kill'd that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you've taken to supply,
You could not do it.
Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
Northern Farmer: New Style
© Alfred Tennyson
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaäy?
Proputty, proputty, proputty—that's what I 'ears 'em saäy.
Proputty, proputty, proputty—Sam, thou's an ass for thy paaïns:
Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs, nor in all thy braaïns.
When She Wouldn’t
© Wesley McNair
When her recorded voice on the phone
said who she was again and again to the piles
of newspapers and magazines and the clothes
Satire III
© John Donne
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids
Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids;
Paradise Lost: Book X
© Patrick Kavanagh
So having said, he thus to Eve in few:
"Say, Woman, what is this which thou hast done?"
To whom sad Eve, with shame nigh overwhelm'd,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge
Bold or loquacious, thus abash'd replied,
"The Serpent me beguil'd, and I did eat."
The Oven Loves the TV Set
© Heather McHugh
Stuck on the fridge, our favorite pin-up girl
is anorexic. On the radio we have a riff
Cabin
© Anne Waldman
eviction people arrive to haunt me
with descriptions of summer’s wildflowers
how they are carpet of fierce colors
Beowulf (modern English translation)
© Pierre Reverdy
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
© Matthew Rohrer
I'm waiting for the Light Beings
to remove my roof.
Our bedroom is lousy with clothes
spelling out greetings if anyone's up there
who can read English.
Nights of 1964—1966: The Old Reliable
© Marilyn Hacker
for Lewis Ellingham
The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . .
James Fenton, “In a Notebook”
