Great poems
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The Legend Of Hamilton Tighe
© Richard Harris Barham
The Captain is walking his quarter-deck,
With a troubled brow and a bended neck;
One eye is down through the hatchway cast,
The other turns up to the truck on the mast;
Yet none of the crew may venture to hint
'Our Skipper hath gotten a sinister squint!'
On Don Surly
© Benjamin Jonson
Don Surly, to aspire the glorious name
Of a great man, and to be thought the same,
To J. D. H.
© Sidney Lanier
Dear friend, forgive a wild lament
Insanely following thy flight
I would not cumber thine ascent
Nor drag thee back into the night;
Don Juan: Canto The Eighth
© George Gordon Byron
Oh blood and thunder! and oh blood and wounds!
These are but vulgar oaths, as you may deem,
Spirit Of The Everlasting Boy
© Henry Van Dyke
ODE FOR THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF LAWRENCEVILLE SCHOOL
June 11, 1910
The Orphans' New Year's Gift
© Arthur Rimbaud
The room is full of shadow; you can hear, indistinctly, the sad soft whispering of two children.
Their foreheads lean forward, still heavy with dreams, beneath the long white bed-curtain
George Washington
© James Russell Lowell
Soldier and statesman, rarest unison;
High-poised example of great duties done
Drury-lane Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick
© Samuel Johnson
When Learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foes
First rear'd the stage, immortal Shakespear rose;
Heard On The Mountain
© Francis Thompson
Soon I distinguished, yet as tone which veils confuse and smother,
Amid this voice two voices, one commingled with the other,
Which did from off the land and seas even to the heavens aspire;
Chanting the universal chant in simultaneous quire.
And I distinguished them amid that deep and rumorous sound,
As who beholds two currents thwart amid the fluctuous profound.
To Alex. Smith, The 'Glasgow Poet,' On His Sonnet To 'Fame'
© George Meredith
Not vainly doth the earnest voice of man
Call for the thing that is his pure desire!
Bigger Than His Dad
© Edgar Albert Guest
He has heard his country calling, and has fallen into line,
And he's doing something bigger than his daddy ever did;
He has caught a greater vision than the finest one of mine,
And I know to-day I'm prouder of than sorry for the kid.
Parable Of The Madman
© Friedrich Nietzsche
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning
hours,
Crazed
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
'The Spring again hath started on the course
Wherein she seeketh Summer thro' the Earth.
I will arise and go upon my way.
It may be that the leaves of Autumn hid
His footsteps from me; it may be the snows.
Shut Out
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
The door was shut. I looked between
Its iron bars; and saw it lie,
My garden, mine, beneath the sky,
Pied with all flowers bedewed and green:
Remonstrance
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Bless the dear old verdant land,
Brother, wert thou born of it?
As thy shadow life doth stand,
Twining round its rosy band,
