Good poems
/ page 418 of 545 /The Wishing-Caps
© Rudyard Kipling
Life's all getting and giving,
I've only myself to give.
What shall I do for a living?
I've only one life to live.
The Widow at Windsor
© Rudyard Kipling
'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor
With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?
She 'as ships on the foam -- she 'as millions at 'ome,
An' she pays us poor beggars in red.
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
When the Great Ark
© Rudyard Kipling
When the Great Ark, in Vigo Bay,
Rode stately through the half-manned fleet,
From every ship about her way
She heard the mariners entreat--
Before we take the seas again
Let down your boats and send us men!
When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted
© Rudyard Kipling
And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
Andd no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!
What the People Said
© Rudyard Kipling
(June 21st, 1887)
By the well, where the bullocks go
Silent and blind and slow --
By the field where the young corn dies
What Happened
© Rudyard Kipling
Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, pride of Bow Bazaar,
Owner of a native press, "Barrishter-at-Lar,"
Waited on the Government with a claim to wear
Sabres by the bucketful, rifles by the pair.
The Creeds Of The Bells
© Anonymous
How sweet the chime of the Sabbath bells!
Each one its creed in music tells
The Bloody Sun
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
O WHERE have ye been the morn sae late,
My merry son, come tell me hither?
O where have ye been the morn sae late?
And I wot I hae but anither.
By the water-gate, by the water-gate,
O dear mither.
The Vampire
© Rudyard Kipling
A fool there was and he mad his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair
(Even as you and I!)
Ulster
© Rudyard Kipling
The dark eleventh hour
Draws on and sees us sold
To every evil power
We fought against of old.
The Two-Sided Man
© Rudyard Kipling
Much I owe to the Lands that grew--
More to the Lives that fed--
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.
To the True Romance
© Rudyard Kipling
Thy face is far from this our war,
Our call and counter-cry,
I shall not find Thee quick and kind,
Nor know Thee till I die,
The Truce of the Bear
© Rudyard Kipling
Yearly, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in --
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.
A Tree Song
© Rudyard Kipling
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn):
England shall bide ti11 Judgment Tide,
By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!
Somewhere This
© Eli Siegel
Trees standing in rain;
Footfalls on the pavement, feet crushing leaves;
A little girl leaving her house;
The moon, barely to be seen, shining dully in the gray sky;
Tomlinson
© Rudyard Kipling
Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair --
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
Horace I, 22.
© Eugene Field
Fuscus, whoso to good inclines--
And is a faultless liver--
Nor moorish spear nor bow need fear,
Nor poison-arrowed quiver.