Good poems
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Idea XLIII: Why should your fair eyes with such sovereign grace
© Michael Drayton
Why should your fair eyes with such sovereign grace
Disperse their rays on every vulgar spirit,
Miranda’s Drowned Book
© Debora Greger
Perhaps not world enough, but I had time
to watch a hermit crab align himself
and back into a vacant whelk and haul
the home he wore from rocky A to B.
All that watching—watching for what? A sail
blown off its course by my uncalled-for sighs?
Ave Atque Vale
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
In Memory of Charles Baudelaire
Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs;
Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
The Glories Of The Present
© Edgar Albert Guest
WHAT of the glories after death,
When this frail form gives up its breath?
Bahaman
© Bliss William Carman
To T. B. M.
IN the crowd that thronged the pierhead, come to see their friends take ship
To The Honourable Mrs. Spencer, On Her Removing From Windsor To Rookly In Hampshire.
© Mary Barber
How does thy Manner to thy Words impart
Some won'drous Pow'r to gain upon the Heart,
Engaging All!--Beneficence we see,
Tho' fair Herself, yet owing Charms to Thee:
O fitted Thou for Spencer's Race, who scorn
To think they only for Themselves were born!
End of Winter
© Louise Gluck
You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven
© Roald Dahl
[BASS DRUM LOUDER]
Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole!
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean,
Rulers of empires, and of forests green!
America
© Allen Ginsberg
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
Sleepers Awake
© John Ashbery
Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.
Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.
When Mother Cooked With Wood
© Edgar Albert Guest
I do not quarrel with the gas,
Our modern range is fine,
Desertion
© Rupert Brooke
So light we were, so right we were, so fair faith shone,
And the way was laid so certainly, that, when I'd gone,
from Lyrics of the Street
© Julia Ward Howe
Outside the Party
Thick throng the snow-flakes, the evening is dreary,
Glad rings the music in yonder gay hall;
On her who listens here, friendless and weary,
Heavier chill than the winters doth fall.
To David, About His Education
© Howard Nemerov
The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
