Great poems

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By The Seaside : The Building Of The Ship

© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

On the deck another bride
Is standing by her lover's side.
Shadows from the flags and shrouds,
Like the shadows cast by clouds,
Broken by many a sunny fleck,
Fall around them on the deck.

A Child's Battles

© Algernon Charles Swinburne

Praise of the knights of old
May sleep: their tale is told,
And no man cares:
The praise which fires our lips is
A knight's whose fame eclipses
All of theirs.

War is a game at which all are sure to lose, sooner or
later, play they how they will; yet every nation has
delighted in war, and none more in their day than the
little republic of Genoa, whose galleys, while she had

The Four Queens (Maoriland).

© Arthur Henry Adams

Wellington.
HERE, where the surges of a world of sea
Break on our bastioned walls with league-long sweep,
Four fair young queens their lonely splendour keep,

The Man of Sentiment

© Kenneth Slessor

Part One
[A walled garden of York. It is an August Sunday, and the baying of deep church-bells is blown faintly in a warm wind. Laurence Sterne, prebendary, aged forty-six, and Catherine de Fromantel, a girl who sings at Ranelagh, are dawdling through the arbours, and pause at a path which runs between hedges and cypress-trees round a corner some fifty yards away. Catherine has walked down such a path before, it is to be feared, and halts cautiously upon its fringes.]
Laurence:
Nay, 'tis no Devil's walk,

Homer's Battle Of The Frogs And Mice. Book III

© Thomas Parnell

But down Olympus to the Western Seas,
Far-shooting Phbus drove with fainter Rays,
And a whole War (so Jove ordain'd) begun,
Was fought, and ceas'd, in one revolving Sun.

Angkor

© Robert Laurence Binyon

I
Out of the Forest into a terrible splendour
Of noon, the pinnacles of the temple--portals,
Stone Faces, immense in carven ruin
Above the trembling of giant trees emerge.

Yellowjackets by Yusef Komunyakaa: American Life in Poetry #154 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-

© Ted Kooser

Here, poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who teaches at New York University, shows us a fine portrait of the hard life of a workerâin this case, a horseâand, through metaphor, the terrible, clumsy beauty of his final moments.

Yellowjackets

Peter Bell The Third

© Percy Bysshe Shelley

Is it a party in a parlour,
Crammed just as they on earth were crammed,
Some sipping punch-some sipping tea;
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent, and all-damned!
Peter Bell, by W. Wordsworth.

A Song Prayer

© George MacDonald

Far parted,
Dull-hearted,
We wander, sleep-walking,
Mere shadows, dim-stalking:
Orphans we roam,
Far from home.

O, Time And Change, They Range And Range

O, Time and Change, they range and range

From sunshine round to thunder! -

The Plugger

He isn't very brilliant and his pace is often slow,

There's nothing very flashy in his style;

Sangar

© John Reed

Oh, there was joy in Heaven when Sangar came.
Sweet Mary wept, and bathed and bound his wounds,
And God the Father healed him of despair,
And Jesus gripped his hand, and laughed and laughed.