Great poems
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The Exiles' Line
© Rudyard Kipling
Twelve knots an hour, be they more or less -
Oh slothful mother of much idleness,
Whom neither rivals spur nor contracts speed!
Nay, bear us gently! Wherefore need we press?
A Sonnet Upon The Pitiful Burning Of The Globe Playhouse In
© Anonymous
Now sit thee down, Melpomene,
Wrapp'd in a sea-coal robe,
And tell the doleful tragedy
That late was play'd at Globe;
Jerusalem Delivered - Book 05 - part 01
© Torquato Tasso
THE ARGUMENT.
Gernando scorns Rinaldo should aspire
Stonehenge
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Gaunt on the cloudy plain
Stand the great Stones,
Dwarfed in the vast reach
Of a sky that owns
The Labyrinth
© Henry King
Life is a crooked Labyrinth, and we
Are daily lost in that Obliquity.
'Tis a perplexed circle, in whose round
Nothing but sorrows and new sins abound.
An Elegy
© Thomas Randolph
Love, give me leave to serve thee and be wise,
To keep thy torch in but restore blind eyes.
In An Illuminated Missal
© Charles Kingsley
I would have loved: there are no mates in heaven;
I would be great: there is no pride in heaven;
Shemselnihar
© George Meredith
O my lover! the night like a broad smooth wave
Bears us onward, and morn, a black rock, shines wet.
How I shuddered-I knew not that I was a slave,
Till I looked on thy face:- then I writhed in the net.
Then I felt like a thing caught by fire, that her star
Glowed dark on the bosom of Shemselnihar.
Ultima Thule: Maiden And The Weathercock
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
MAIDEN.
O weathercock on the village spire,
With your golden feathers all on fire,
Tell me, what can you see from your perch
Above there over the tower of the church?
Fragments
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
THE wounded hart and the dying swan
Were side by side
Where the rushes coil with the turn of the tide
The hart and the swan.
The Ballad of the "Britain's Pride"
© William Watson
It was a skipper of Lowestoft
That trawled the northern sea,
I Make This In A Warring Absence
© Dylan Thomas
I make a weapon of an ass's skeleton
And walk the warring sands by the dead town.
Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown,
Storm her sped heart, hang with beheaded veins
Its wringing shell, and let her eyelids fasten.
Destruction, picked by birds, brays through the jaw-bone,
Ernestness
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
The hurry of the times affects us so
In this swift rushing hour, we crowd and press
And thrust each other backward as we go,
And do not pause to lay sufficient stress
Elegy XV: A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife
© John Donne
I SING no harm, good sooth, to any wight,
To lord or fool, cuckold, beggar, or knight,
Ruth
© Henry Lawson
Are the fields of my fancy less fair through a window thats narrowed and barred?
Are the morning stars dimmed by the glare of the gas-light that flares in the yard?
No! And what does it matter to me if to-morrow I sail from the land?
I am free, as I never was free! I exult in my loneliness grand!
The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto IV
© Edmund Spenser
To sinfull house of Pride, Duessa
guides the faithfull knight,
Where brothers death to wreak Sansjoy
doth chalenge him to fight.
Winter
© Czeslaw Milosz
The pungent smells of a California winter,
Grayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.
I add logs to the fire, I drink and I ponder.
A Million Young Work Men
© Carl Sandburg
A million young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads,
And the million are now under soil and their rottening flesh will in the years feed roots of blood-red roses.
Within and Without: Part I: A Dramatic Poem
© George MacDonald
Robert.
Head in your hands as usual! You will fret
Your life out, sitting moping in the dark.
Come, it is supper-time.
The Outlaw
© Charles Kingsley
Oh, I wadna be a yeoman, mither, to follow my father's trade,
To bow my back in miry banks, at pleugh and hoe and spade.
Stinting wife, and bairns, and kye, to fat some courtier lord,-
Let them die o' rent wha like, mither, and I'll die by sword.
