Good poems
/ page 458 of 545 /
Who Learns My Lesson Complete?
© Walt Whitman
The great laws take and effuse without argument;
I am of the same style, for I am their friend,
I love them quits and quits-I do not halt, and make salaams.
A Song To David
© Christopher Smart
I
O THOU, that sit'st upon a throne,
With harp of high majestic tone,
To praise the King of kings;
To Giovanni Salzilli, A Roman Poet, In His Illness. Scazons (Translated From Milton)
© William Cowper
My halting Muse, that dragg'st by choice along
Thy slow, slow step, in melancholy song!
Farewell and Thanksgiving
© Mark van Doren
Whatever I have left unsaid
When I am dead
O'muse forgive me.
You were always there,
Born Brothers
© Mark van Doren
Nor do born brothers judge, as good or ill,
Their being. Each consents and is the same,
Or suddenly sweet winds turn into flame
And floods are on us--fire, earth, water, air
All hideously parted, as his will
Withdraws, no longer fatherly and there.
Flower of Youth
© Katharine Tynan
LEST Heaven be thronged with grey-beards hoary,
God, who made boys for His delight,
Stoops in a day of grief and glory
And calls them in, in from the night.
When they come trooping from the war
Our skies have many a new gold star.
Je Suis une table
© Donald Hall
It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,
The Wanderer: A Vision: Canto I
© Richard Savage
The solar fires now faint and wat'ry burn,
Just where with ice Aquarius frets his urn!
If thaw'd, forth issue, from its mouth severe,
Raw clouds, that sadden all th' inverted year.
The Alligator Bride
© Donald Hall
Now the beard on my clock turns white.
My cat stares into dark corners
missing her gold umbrella.
She is in love
with the Alligator Bride.
Hudibras: Part 2 - Canto III
© Samuel Butler
Doubtless the pleasure is as great
Of being cheated as to cheat;
As lookers-on feel most delight,
That least perceive a jugler's slight;
And still the less they understand,
The more th' admire his slight of hand.
On Church Communion - Part II.
© John Byrom
If once establish'd the essential part,
The inward Church, the Temple of the Heart,
Or house of God, the substance, and the sum
Of what is pray'd for in - thy kingdom come;
To make an outward correspondence true,
We must recur to Christ's example too.
Poem
© Ernest Hemingway
The only man I ever loved
Said good bye
And went away
He was killed in Picardy
On a sunny day.
The Waggoner - Canto Fourth
© William Wordsworth
THUS they, with freaks of proud delight,
Beguile the remnant of the night;
And many a snatch of jovial song
Regales them as they wind along;
It Is Not Beauty I Demand
© George Darley
It is not Beauty I demand,
A crystal brow, the moon's despair,
Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand,
Nor mermaid's yellow pride of hair.
Impression Fausse
© Paul Verlaine
Dame mouse patters
Black against the shadow grey;
Dame mouse patters
Grey against the black.
Thinking For Berky
© William Stafford
In the late night listening from bed
I have joined the ambulance or the patrol
screaming toward some drama, the kind of end
that Berky must have some day, if she isn't dead.
The Voices
© John Greenleaf Whittier
"WHY urge the long, unequal fight,
Since Truth has fallen in the street,
Or lift anew the trampled light,
Quenched by the heedless million's feet?
Waking at 3 a.m.
© William Stafford
You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.
Byron
© Joaquin Miller
IN men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,
I do not dare to draw a line
Between the two, where God has not.
