Good poems
/ page 392 of 545 /
Written In The First Leaf Of A Child's Memorandum-Book
© Charles Lamb
My neat and pretty book, when I thy small lines see
They seem for any use to be unfit for me.
For Sidney Bechet
© Philip Larkin
That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes
Like New Orleans reflected on the water,
And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes,
Dockery And Son
© Philip Larkin
'Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
On The Victory Obtained By Blake Over the Spaniards, In The
© Andrew Marvell
Now does Spains Fleet her spatious wings unfold,
Leaves the new World and hastens for the old:
But though the wind was fair, the slowly swoome
Frayted with acted Guilt, and Guilt to come:
Money
© Philip Larkin
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex,
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'
Sunny Prestatyn
© Philip Larkin
Come to Sunny Prestatyn
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand
In tautened white satin.
Orlie Wilde
© James Whitcomb Riley
A goddess, with a siren's grace,-
A sun-haired girl on a craggy place
Above a bay where fish-boats lay
Drifting about like birds of prey.
Best Society
© Philip Larkin
When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
A Meditation On Rhode-Island Coal
© William Cullen Bryant
I sat beside the glowing grate, fresh heaped
With Newport coal, and as the flame grew bright
--The many-coloured flame--and played and leaped,
I thought of rainbows and the northern light,
Moore's Lalla Rookh, the Treasury Report,
And other brilliant matters of the sort.
The Minstrel; Or, The Progress Of Genius : Book I.
© James Beattie
I.
Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar!
Ah! who can tell how many a soul sublime
Next, Please
© Philip Larkin
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,
The Fellowship Of Books
© Edgar Albert Guest
I care not who the man may be,
Nor how his tasks may fret him,
Nor where he fares, nor how his cares
And troubles may beset him,
If books have won the love of him,
The Georges
© Walter Savage Landor
George the First was always reckoned
Vile, but viler George the Second;
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third?
When from earth the Fourth descended
(God be praised!) the Georges ended.
Poetry Of Departures
© Philip Larkin
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
The Whitsun Weddings
© Philip Larkin
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
Words
© Yahia Lababidi
Words are like days:
coloring books or pickpockets,
signposts or scratching posts,
fakirs over hot coals.
The Rebel Scot
© John Cleveland
Yet wonder not at this their happy choice,
The serpent's fatal still to Paradise.
Sure, England hath the hemorrhoids, and these
On the north postern of the patient seize
Like leeches; thus they physically thirst
After our blood, but in the cure shall burst!
