Great poems
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The Return of the Year
© Archibald Lampman
Again the warm bare earth, the noon
That hangs upon her healing scars,
The midnight round, the great red moon,
The mother with her brood of stars,
A Meditation
© Herman Melville
How often in the years that close,
When truce had stilled the sieging gun,
The soldiers, mounting on their works,
With mutual curious glance have run
From face to face along the fronting show,
And kinsman spied, or friend--even in a foe.
Natalias Resurrection: Sonnet VIII
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
And so it was that, sitting ever thus
Dumb to all speech of those that knew her woe
And bare with her sole sorrow in the house,
And ever watching with sad eyes below
Flower-De-Luce: The Wind Over The Chimney
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
See, the fire is sinking low,
Dusky red the embers glow,
While above them still I cower,
While a moment more I linger,
Though the clock, with lifted finger,
Points beyond the midnight hour.
At The Fall Of An Age
© Robinson Jeffers
(The story of Achilles rising from the dead for love of Helen
is well enough known. That of Polyxo's vengeance may be less
The Lord of the Isles: Canto IV.
© Sir Walter Scott
I.
Stranger! if e'er thine ardent step hath traced
The Three Fates
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
Up in the cave of the wind
Bent with their difficult years
In mocking laughter they sit,
Old Distaff, Spindle, and Shears.
A Parson's Letter To A Young Poet
© Jean Ingelow
They said: "We, rich by him, are rich by more;
One Aeschylus found watchfires on a hill
That lit Old Night's three daughters to their work;
When the forlorn Fate leaned to their red light
And sat a-spinning, to her feet he came
And marked her till she span off all her thread.
Faithful In Vanity-Fair
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
THE great human whirlpool--'t is seething and seething:
On! No time for shrieking out--scarcely for breathing:
All toiling and moiling, some feebler, some bolder,
But each sees a fiend-face grim over his shoulder:
Thus merrily live they in Vanity-fair.
The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, `Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear.'
Sonnet LXXXII. To The Shade Of Burns
© Charlotte Turner Smith
MUTE is thy wild harp, now, O bard sublime!
Who, amid Scotia's mountain solitude,
Great Nature taught to "build the lofty rhyme,"
And even beneath the daily pressure, rude,
On A Shadow In A Glass
© Jonathan Swift
By something form'd, I nothing am,
Yet everything that you can name;
In no place have I ever been,
Yet everywhere I may be seen;
To Lamartine
© James Russell Lowell
I did not praise thee when the crowd,
'Witched with the moment's inspiration,
Vexed thy still ether with hosannas loud,
And stamped their dusty adoration;
I but looked upward with the rest,
And, when they shouted Greatest, whispered Best.
Marmion: Introduction to Canto VI.
© Sir Walter Scott
Heap on more wood! the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
London - in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal
© Samuel Johnson
'--Quis ineptae
Tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus ut teneat se?' ~ Juv.
The Little HandMaiden
© Archibald Lampman
The King's son walks in the garden fair-
Oh, the maiden's heart is merry!
He little knows for his toil and care,
That the bride is gone and the bower is bare.
Put on garments of white, my maidens!
The Death Of President Lincoln
© Joseph Furphy
Now let the howling tempest roar
For Booth can feel its force no more;
Now let the captors bend their steel
Against the form that cannot feel
Their tyranny has spent its hour
And Booth is far beyond their power.
Minnie and Winnie
© Alfred Tennyson
Minnie and Winnie
Slept in a shell.
Sleep, little ladies!
And they slept well.
