Great poems
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Morituri Salutamus: Poem For The 50th Anniversary Of The Class Of 1825 In Bowdoin College
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
~OVID, Fastorum, Lib. vi.
First Love
© Giacomo Leopardi
Ah, well can I the day recall, when first
The conflict fierce of love I felt, and said:
If _this_ be love, how hard it is to bear!
The Challenge Answered
© Alfred Austin
So at length the word is uttered which the vain Gaul long hath muttered
'Twixt his teeth, by envy fluttered at another land being great;
And the dogs of war are loosèd, and the carnagestream unsluicèd,
That the might of France abusèd may torment the world like Fate.
The Roll Of Roly Poly Roy
© Carolyn Wells
Once on a time a lad I knew--
His sister called him Bubby;
'The Aeneid of Virgil: Book 12
© Publius Vergilius Maro
WHEN Turnus saw the Latins leave the field,
Their armies broken, and their courage quelld,
Army Of Northern Virginia
© Stephen Vincent Benet
He only said it once-the marble closed-
There was a man enclosed within that image.
There was a force that tried Proportion's rule
And died without a legend or a cue
To bring it back. The shadow-Lees still live.
But the first-person and the singular Lee?
Hymn 69
© Isaac Watts
[Begin, my tongue, some heav'nly theme,
And speak some boundless thing;
The mighty works, or mightier name,
Of our eternal King.
The Change
© Abraham Cowley
LOVE in her sunny eyes does basking play;
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair;
Love does on both her lips for ever stray
And sows and reaps a thousand kisses there.
In all her outward parts Love's always seen;
But, oh, He never went within.
Either She Was A Fool
© Ovid
EITHER she was fool, or her attire was bad,
Or she was not the wench I wished to have had.
Daniel Neall
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I.
FRIENDof the Slave, and yet the friend of all;
Lover of peace, yet ever foremost when
The need of battling Freedom called for men
Don Juan: Canto The Third
© George Gordon Byron
The isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
The Acquittance
© Henry King
Not knowing who should my Acquittance take,
I know as little what discharge to make.
The favour is so great, that it out-goes
All forms of thankfulness I can propose,
Sunday Morning
© Louis MacNeice
Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man's heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,
Ballad Of The Armada
© Henry Austin Dobson
GLORIANA! the Don may attack us
Whenever his stomach be fain;
He must reach us before he can rack us, -
And where are the galleons of Spain?
Once More, the Round
© Theodore Roethke
What's greater, Pebble or Pond?
What can be known? The Unknown.
Ode To The Spirit Of The Earth In Autumn
© George Meredith
The crimson-footed nymph is panting up the glade,
With the wine-jar at her arm-pit, and the drunken ivy-braid
Round her forehead, breasts, and thighs: starts a Satyr, and they
speed:
Hear the crushing of the leaves: hear the cracking of the bough!
And the whistling of the bramble, the piping of the weed!
The Black Virgin
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
One in thy thousand statues we salute thee
On all thy thousand thrones acclaim and claim
