Good poems
/ page 73 of 545 /
The Task: Book III. -- The Garden
© William Cowper
As one who, long in thickets and in brakes
Entangled, winds now this way and now that
O Never Say That I Was False of Heart
© William Shakespeare
O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem'd my flame to qualify:
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie;
Unrest In Autumn
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
Beside my window sighs the last lone rose,
Saying, Alas! farewell! Youth's all but dead.
Fiddler Of Dooney
© William Butler Yeats
WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
The Pessimist
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
You that have snarled through the ages, take your answer and go--
I know your hoary question, the riddle that all men know.
You have weighed the stars in a balance, and grasped the skies in a span:
Take, if you must have answer, the word of a common man.
In The Garden IV: The Singer
© Edward Dowden
"THAT was the thrush's last good-night," I thought,
And heard the soft descent of summer rain
John Dunmore Lang
© Henry Kendall
The song that is last of the many
Whose music is full of thy name,
King Seuen On The Occasion Of A Great Drought
© Confucius
Grand shone the Milky Way on high,
With brilliant span athwart the sky,
The White Moon Wasteth
© Jean Ingelow
The white moon wasteth,
And cold morn hasteth
Athwart the snow,
The red east burneth
And the tide turneth,
And thou must go.
"Igo And Ago"
© James Whitcomb Riley
We're The Twins from Aunt Marinn's,
Igo and Ago.
When Dad comes, the show begins!--
Iram, coram, dago.
With Eternity Standing By
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
How shall I bid you good--bye,
Dear, without tears?
Only once in the years,
The idle vanishing years,
Santa Paula by Lee McCarthy: American Life in Poetry #148 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
I've written about the pleasures of poetry that offers us vivid scenes but which lets us draw our own conclusions about the implications of what we're being shown. The poet can steer us a little by the selection of details, but a lot of the effect of the poem is in what is not said, in what we deduce. Lee McCarthy is a California poet, and here is something seen from across the street, something quite ordinary yet packed with life.
The Prodigal
© Peter McArthur
LAST night the boy came back to me again,
The laughing boy, all-credulous of good
Alice And The White Knight
© Lewis Carroll
Alice was walking beside the White Knight in Looking Glass Land.
"You are sad." the Knight said in an anxious tone: "let me sing you a song to comfort you."
The Second Hymn; being a Dialogue between Three Shepherds
© Jeremy Taylor
Chorus.
O what a gracious God have we!
How good? how great? Even as our misery.
A Russian Tale
© Zbigniew Herbert
The tsar our little father had grown old, very old. Now he could not even strangle a dove with his own hands. Sitting on his throne he was golden and frigid. Only his beard grew, down to the floor and farther.
Then someone else ruled, it was not known who. Curious folk peeped into the palace windows but Krivonosov screened the windows with gibbets. Thus only the hanged saw anything.
The Story Of Glaucus The Thessalian
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Up to the deep founts of the tenderest eyes
That e'er have shone, I think, since in some dell
Of Argos and enchanted Thessaly,
The poet, from whose heart-lit brain it came,
Murmured this record unto her he loved?
Recollection of the Arabian Nights
© Alfred Tennyson
WHEN the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
