Good poems
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The Character Of The Bore
© John Donne
Well; I may now receive and die. My sin
Indeed is great, but yet I have been in
You Who Wronged
© Czeslaw Milosz
You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,
God Hides His People
© William Cowper
To lay the soul that loves him low,
Becomes the Onlywise:
To hide beneath a veil of woe,
The children of the skies.
Love Is Enough: Songs I-IX
© William Morris
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
A Death in the Desert
© Robert Browning
Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept:
It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,
Was burned, and could not write the chronicle.
The Waste Land
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
Another Night in the Ruins
© Washington Allston
5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.
Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV
© Alexander Pope
Still follow sense, of ev'ry art the soul,
Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start ev'n from difficulty, strike from chance;
Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at—perhaps a Stowe.
A Happy Childhood
© William Matthews
No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo
My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air
A Ballad of Baseball Burdens
© Edwin Morgan
Ah, Fans, let not the Quarry but the Chase
Be that to which most fondly we aspire!
For us not Stake, but Game; not Goal, but Race—
THIS is the end of every fan’s desire.
Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though loath to grieve
The evil time's sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My honied thought
For the priest's cant,
Or statesman's rant.
Little Ache
© Li-Young Lee
That sparrow on the iron railing,
not worth a farthing, purchases a realm
its shrill cries measure, trading
dying for being.
Climbing Milestone Mountain, August 22, 1937
© Kenneth Rexroth
For a month now, wandering over the Sierras,
A poem had been gathering in my mind,
Stars In The Sea
© Roderic Quinn
I took a boat on a starry night
and went for a row on the water,
and she danced like a child on a wake of light
and bowed where the ripples caught her.
Jerusalem Delivered - Book 06 - part 01
© Torquato Tasso
THE ARGUMENT.
Argantes calls the Christians out to just:
Laus Veneris
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly — fairer for a fleck.
