Good poems
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Elegy XIX
© John Donne
Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
Two Tramps In Mud Time
© Robert Frost
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.
Birches
© Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Thoughts on Predestination and Reprobation : Part IV.
© John Byrom
To bless is his immutable decree,
Such as could never have begun to be:
Mending Wall
© Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.
Jericho; or, The Waters Healed
© John Newton
Though Jericho pleasantly stood,
And looked like a promising soil;
The Sending Of The Magi
© Bliss William Carman
IN a far Eastern country
It happened long of yore,
Where a lone and level sunrise
Flushes the desert floor,
English Flavors
© Laure-Anne Bosselaar
I love to lick English the way I licked the hard
round licorice sticks the Belgian nuns gave me for six
good conduct points on Sundays after mass.
The Worlds in this World
© Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Doors were left open in heaven again:
drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages
around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters
flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,
Sonnet Written Among The Ruins Of The Castle At Heidelberg
© Frances Anne Kemble
Weep'st thou to see the ruin and decay
Which Time doth wreak upon earth's mighty things?
The Miner
© James Russell Lowell
Down 'mid the tangled roots of things
That coil about the central fire,
I seek for that which giveth wings
To stoop, not soar, to my desire.
Testament
© Wendell Berry
2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
© Wendell Berry
The poem is important, but
not more than the people
whose survival it serves,
Sonnet 18: With What Sharp Checks
© Sir Philip Sidney
With what sharp checks I in myself am shent,
When into Reason's audit I do go:
And by just counts myself a bankrupt know
Of all the goods, which heav'n to me hath lent:
A Boy Named Sue
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
Well, my daddy left home when I was three,
and he didn't leave much to Ma and me,
just this old guitar and a bottle of booze.
Now I don't blame him because he run and hid,
but the meanest thing that he ever did was
before he left he went and named me Sue.
A Dramatic Poem
© William Butler Yeats
Second Sailor. And I had thought to make
A good round Sum upon this cruise, and turn -
For I am getting on in life - to something
That has less ups and downs than robbery.
Upon Over-Much Niceness
© John Bunyan
Tis much to see how over nice some are
About the body and household affair,
