Great poems
/ page 235 of 549 /
In Westminster Abbey
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
"The Southern Transept, hardly known by any other name but Poets' Corner"
DEAN STANLEY
The Angel In The House. Book II. Canto XI.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
IV Constancy rewarded
I vow'd unvarying faith, and she,
To whom in full I pay that vow,
Rewards me with variety
Which men who change can never know.
"I cant prevent myself from singing"
© Thibaut de Champagne
Mercy, my lady, who knows all things!
All goodness and everything worth having
Are yours: more than any woman living.
Help me, now, it is in your giving!
The Zeppelin Armada
© Jessie Pope
"TO-DAY, since Zeppelins are in the air,
And folks glance skywards as they go their ways,
Thunder On The Downs
© Robert Laurence Binyon
And if a lightning now were loosed in flame
Out of the darkness of the cloud to claim
Thy heart, O England, how wouldst thou be known
In that hour? How to the quick core be shown
And seen? What cry should from thy very soul
Answer the judgment of that thunder--roll?
Abraham Lincoln
© Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
Child of the boundless prairie, son of the virgin soil,
Heir to the bearing of burdens, brother to them that toil;
God and Nature together shaped him to lead in the van,
In the stress of her wildest weather when the Nation needed
a Man.
On Content
© Thomas Parnell
Grant heav'n that I may chuse my bliss
If you design me worldly Happiness
Autumn Plaint
© Stéphane Mallarme
Since Maria left me to go to another star - which one, Orion, Altair - or
you green Venus? - I have always loved solitude. How many long days I have passed alone with my cat. By alone I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystic companion, a spirit. I can say then that I have passed long days alone with my cat and alone with one of the last authors of the Roman decadence; for since the white creature is no more I have loved, uniquely and strangely, everything summed up in the word: fall. So, in the year, my favourite season is the last slow part of summer that just precedes autumn, and, in the day, the hour when I walk is when the sun hesitates before vanishing, with rays of yellow bronze over the grey walls, and rays of red copper over the tiles. Literature, also, from which my spirit asks voluptuousness, that will be the agonised poetry of Romes last moments, so long as it does not breathe a breath of the reinvigorated stance of the Barbarians or stammer in childish Latin like Christian prose. I was reading then one of those dear poems (whose flakes of rouge have more charm for me than young flesh), and dipping a hand into the pure animal fur, when a street organ sounded languishingly and sadly under my window. It was playing in the great alley of poplars whose leaves, even in spring, seem mournful to me since Maria passed by them, on her last journey, lying among candles. The instrument of sadnesses, yes, certainly: the piano flashes, the violin gives off light from its torn fibres, but the street organ in memorys half-light made me dream despairingly. Now it murmured a delightfully common song that filled the faubourgs with joy, an old, banal tune: why did its words pierce my soul and make me cry, like any romantic ballad? I savoured it slowly and did not throw a coin through the window for fear of troubling my spirit and discovering that not only the instrument was playing.
The Mistress Of Vision
© Francis Thompson
Secret was the garden;
Set i' the pathless awe
Where no star its breath can draw.
Life, that is its warden,
Sits behind the fosse of death. Mine eyes saw not,
and I saw.
II. Great God, and just! how canst Thou see
© Jeremy Taylor
Great God, and just! how canst Thou see,
Dear God, our miserie,
The Winds Of War-News
© Henry Van Dyke
The winds of war-news change and veer:
Now westerly and full of cheer,
From: Time In The Rock
© Conrad Aiken
These things do not perplex, these things are simple,
but what of the heart that wishes to survive change
and cannot, its love lost in confusions and dismay?
what of the thought dispersed in its own algebras,
hypothesis proved fallacy? what of the will
which finds its aim unworthy? Are these, too, simple?
A Story Of Doom: Book IX.
© Jean Ingelow
The prayer of Noah. The man went forth by night
And listened; and the earth was dark and still,
The Torments Of Love
© Sappho
O Queens of Song, descend from your home.
From the golden halls of Olumpus on high!
To Bayard Taylor Beyond Us
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
AS here within I watch the fervid coals,
While the chill heavens without shine wanly white,
I wonder, friend! in what rare realm of souls,
You hail the uprising Christmas-tide to-night!
A Recompense
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
The hound that followed at my heel
Looked up with eyes so full of love
I kissed the curly brows between
And blessed the God above.
Foresight And Patience
© George Meredith
Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.
An Anglers Wish
© Henry Van Dyke
I
WHEN tulips bloom in Union Square,
And timid breaths of vernal air
Go wandering down the dusty town,
Like children lost in Vanity Fair;
