Good poems
/ page 286 of 545 /
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
Song: Kind Adieu
© Margaret Widdemer
GOOD-BY, my dear, good-by
You woke my heart to break it,
So if another take it
Why need you turn or sigh?
The Prime of Life
© Henry Lawson
OH, the strength of the toil of those twenty years, with father, and master, and men!
And the clearer brain of the business man, who has held his own for ten:
Oh, the glorious freedom from business fears, and the rest from domestic strife!
The past is dead, and the future assured, and Im in the prime of life!
Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
We have eaten
the blackberries and spat out
the seeds, but they lie
glittering like the eyes of a man.
Later On
© William Percy French
Later on, later on,
Oh what many friends have gone,
Sweet lips that smiled and loving eyes that shone
Through the darkness into light,
One by one they've winged their flight
And perhaps we'll play together -- later on.
W. Gilmore Simms
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
THE swift mysterious seasons rise and set;
The omnipotent years pass o'er us, bright or dun;--
Dawns blush, and mid-days burn, 'till scarce aware
Of what deep meaning haunts our twilight air,
To An Early Violet
© Swami Vivekananda
What though thy bed be frozen earth,
Thy cloak the chilling blast;
Nonsense Alphabet
© Edward Lear
A was an Area Arch
Where washerwomen sat;
They made a lot of lovely starch
To starch Papa's cravat.
Tom Deadlight (1810)
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnought, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'-wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought.
Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For Ive received orders for to sail for the Deadman,
But hope with the grand fleet to see you again.
Love: To A Little Girl
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
When we all lie still
Where churchyard pines their funeral vigil keep,
Ferdiah; Or, The Fight At The Ford
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Time is it, O Cuchullin, to arise,
Time for the fearful combat to prepare;
For hither with the anger in his eyes,
To fight thee comes Ferdiah called the Fair.
Annie Protheroe. A Legend of Stratford-le-Bow
© William Schwenck Gilbert
OH! listen to the tale of little ANNIE PROTHEROE.
She kept a small post-office in the neighbourhood of BOW;
She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day -
A gentle executioner whose name was GILBERT CLAY.
from Venus and Adonis
© William Shakespeare
Even as the sunne with purple-colourd face,
Had tane his last leaue of the weeping morne,
Rose-cheekt Adonis hied him to the chace,
Hunting he lou'd, but loue he laught to scorne,
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amaine vnto him,
And like a bold fac'd suter ginnes to woo him.
To Aristius Fuscus
© Eugene Field
Fuscus, whoso to good inclines,
And is a faultless liver,
Nor Moorish spear nor bow need fear,
Nor poison-arrowed quiver.
To the Mannequins
© Howard Nemerov
Adorable images,
Plaster of Paris
Lilies of the field,
You are not alive, therefore
Pathos will be out of place.
The Song of Songs
© King Solomon
The Song of songs, which is Solomon's.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth:
for thy love is better than wine.
Because of the savor of thy good ointments
thy name is as ointment poured forth,
therefore do the virgins love thee.
Amoretti LXXXI: Fayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares
© Edmund Spenser
Fayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares,
With the loose wynd ye waving chance to marke:
Wolf And Hound
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
You'll take my tale with a little salt;
But it needs none, nevertheless!
I was foiled completely - fair at fault -
Disheartened, too, I confess!
