Great poems
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Three Day's Ride
© Stephen Vincent Benet
"FROM Belton Castle to Solway side,
Hard by the bridge, is three days' ride."
England
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
While men pay reverence to mighty things,
They must revere thee, thou blue-cinctured isle
Rhymed Plea For Tolerance - Prefatory Dialogue
© John Kenyon
Ye, thus who write in spite of critic law,
How had their satire kept your freaks in awe!
And, to sole sway controlling her pretence,
Bound Fancy down to compromise with Sense!
The Old Liberators by Robert Hedin: American Life in Poetry #185 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
When I was a boy, there were still a few veterans of the Spanish American War, and more of The Great War, or World War I, and now all those have died and those who served in World War II are passing from us, too. Robert Hedin, a Minnesota poet, has written a fine poem about these people.
The Old Liberators
The Mirror Of Madmen
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
I dreamed a dream of heaven, white as frost,
The splendid stillness of a living host;
Vast choirs of upturned faces, line o'er line.
Then my blood froze; for every face was mine.
The Zouaves At Bethel
© Anonymous
Five Zouaves killed! - one thousand in all -
Five from a thousand? Then he may be one.
If in the havoc of bayonet and ball,
So many were killed, one may be my son.
And death, to the boy, all the glory he won.
Agamemnons Tomb
© Emma Lazarus
Uplift the ponderous, golden mask of death,
And let the sun shine on him as it did
Thomas Joseph Byrnes
© George Essex Evans
Calm be his sleep who lived to dare.
Go, say a patriot slumbers there
Whose brows were never bent to wear
His loftiest fame,
Yet wrote on Queenslands page a rare
A fadeless name!
The Trumpets Of Heaven
© Leon Gellert
A silver cry is calling from a height
Leaving the awful pause that follows song,
And through the silence shines a stretching light-
A stretching light that quietly runs along
Sonnet XI
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Not on the low or lofty, great or small,
Should justice fix for judgment; the true soul,
Which sways its own world in serene control,
Highest or humblest--such the Masters call
Shall summon upward, with its deep "well done,"
And the just Father crown his faithful son!
Homage To Sextus Propertius - IX
© Ezra Pound
1
The twisted rhombs ceased their clamour of accompaniment;
The scorched laurel lay in the fire-dust;
The moon still declined to descend out of heaven,
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 1. The Sicilian's Tale; King Robert of Sicily
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Days came and went; and now returned again
To Sicily the old Saturnian reign;
Under the Angel's governance benign
The happy island danced with corn and wine,
And deep within the mountain's burning breast
Enceladus, the giant, was at rest.
A Riverina Road
© Thomas William Heney
A land of camps where seldom is sojourning,
Where men like the dim fathers of our race
Halt for a time, and next day, unreturning,
Fare ever on apace.
The Ring And The Book - Chapter X - The Pope
© Robert Browning
Then Stephen, Pope and seventh of the name,
Cried out, in synod as he sat in state,
While choler quivered on his brow and beard,
Come into court, Formosus, thou lost wretch,
That claimedst to be late the Pope as I!
Epipsychidion: Passages Of The Poem, Or Connected Therewith
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
To the oblivion whither I and thou,
All loving and all lovely, hasten now
With steps, ah, too unequal! may we meet
In one Elysium or one winding-sheet!
Belgium
© John Le Gay Brereton
We, bred of one small island in the west,
A little shrine of Freedom, far away
We, who can bow at no strong tyrants hest,
Bend low our heads in pride to thee to-day,
For all unknown, a smiling babe at rest,
Within thy lowly manger Freedom lay.
The Aeneid of Virgil: Book 11
© Publius Vergilius Maro
SCARCE had the rosy Morning raisd her head
Above the waves, and left her watry bed;
Red Lips Are Not So Red
© Wilfred Owen
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
