Good poems
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Come Home, Father!
© Henry Clay Work
'Tis The
SONG OF LITTLE MARY,
Standing at the bar-room door
While the shameful midnight revel
Rages wildly as before.
Father, dear father, come home with me now!
The Dean Of Santiago
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
The Dean of Santiago on his mule
Rode quick the Guadalquivir banks along,
The Southern Press
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
When a Negro comes in question you may watch the Southern press,
See how bias its opinions, how his ills are given stress,
Prominence is given headlines, when accused he is of crime,
Emphasizes all the evils of the Negro ev'ry time.
On A Midge
© George MacDonald
Whence do ye come, ye creatures? Each of you
Is perfect as an angel! wings and eyes
Indian Summer by Diane Glancy : American Life in Poetry #233 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
Diane Glancy is one of our country’s Native American poets, and I recently judged her latest book, Asylum in the Grasslands, the winner of a regional competition. Here is a good example of her clear and steady writing.
Indian Summer
There’s a farm auction up the road.
Canto I: And Then Went Down to the Ship
© Ezra Pound
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
To The Memory Of Mary Young
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
GOD has his plans, and what if we
With our sight be too blind to see
When Day Is Done
© Edgar Albert Guest
When day is done and the night slips down,
And I've turned my back on the busy town,
And come once more to the welcome gate
Where the roses nod and the children wait,
I tell myself as I see them smile
That life is good and its tasks worth while.
Epilogue To Lessing's Laocooen
© Matthew Arnold
One morn as through Hyde Park we walk'd,
My friend and I, by chance we talk'd
Alfred. Book III.
© Henry James Pye
Fix'd on the arid spot, whose scanty bounds
On every side the deep morass surrounds,
The monarch, and his martial friend, with care,
'Gainst close surprise and bold attack prepare;
Exert each art their safety to ensure,
And every pass, with wary eye, secure.
Saint Oluf (From The Old Danish)
© George Borrow
St. Oluf was a mighty king,
Who ruld the Northern land;
The holy Christian faith he preachd,
And taught it, sword in hand.
Gregory Parable, LL.D.
© William Schwenck Gilbert
He knew no guile, this simple man,
No worldly wile, or plot, or plan,
Except that plot of freehold land
That held the cot, and MARY, and
Her worthy father, named by me
GREGORY PARABLE, LL.D.
The Intellectual
© Karl Shapiro
The man behind the book may not be man,
His own man or the books or yet the times,
But still be whole, deciding what he can
In praise of politics or German rimes;
Sancho Sanchez
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Sancho Sanchez lay a--dying in the house of Mariquita,
For his life ebbed with the ebbing of the red wound in his side.
And he lay there as they left him when he came from the Corrida
In his gold embroidered jacket and his red cloak and his pride.
Sir Macklin
© William Schwenck Gilbert
Of all the youths I ever saw
None were so wicked, vain, or silly,
So lost to shame and Sabbath law,
As worldly TOM, and BOB, and BILLY.
The Faithful Few: An Ode
© William Hamilton
While Pow'r triumphant bears unrival'd Sway,
Propt by the Aid of all-prevailing Gold;
While bold Corruption blasts the Face of Day,
And Men, in Herds, are offer'd to be sold;
Select, Urania, from the venal Throng,
The Faithful Few, to grace the deathless Song!
