Great poems
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Fragment: Great Spirit
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Great Spirit whom the sea of boundless thought
Nurtures within its unimagined caves,
In which thou sittest sole, as in my mind,
Giving a voice to its mysterious waves--
Finding
© Rupert Brooke
From the candles and dumb shadows,
And the house where love had died,
I stole to the vast moonlight
And the whispering life outside.
Failure
© Rupert Brooke
All the great courts were quiet in the sun,
And full of vacant echoes: moss had grown
Over the glassy pavement, and begun
To creep within the dusty council-halls.
An idle wind blew round an empty throne
And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls.
Easter-Day
© Alessandro Manzoni
Yes, HE IS RISEN. That hallowéd head
No longer lies wrapped in the cloth of the dead.
HE IS SURELY RISEN. At the side of the tomb
Lies the overturned door of the solitary room.
Like the valorous champion drunk after strife
The LORD has awaked to omnipotent life;
The Great Lover
© Rupert Brooke
O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, "All these were lovely"; say "He loved".
Lines Written On The Pillar Erecting To The Memory Of Mr. Barlow,
© Helen Maria Williams
Minister of the United States at Paris, WHO DIED AT NAROWITCH IN POLAND, ON HIS RETURN
FROM WILNA, DEC. 26, 1812.
The Forester
© Robert Bloomfield
Born in a dark wood's lonely dell,
Where echoes roar'd, and tendrils curl'd
Gettysburg
© Herman Melville
O Pride of the days in prime of the months
Now trebled in great renown,
When before the ark of our holy cause
Fell Dagon down-
A Shining Ship
© Harry Kemp
Have you ever seen a shining ship
Riding the broad-backed wave,
While the sailors pull the ropes and sing
The chantey's lusty stave?
Sonnet IV "They Dub Thee Idler, Smiling Sneeringly"
© Henry Timrod
They dub thee idler, smiling sneeringly,
And why? because, forsooth, so many moons,
The Secret
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I
I lay upon my bed in the great night:
The sense of my body drowsed;
But a clearness yet lingered in the spirit,
By soft obscurity housed.
Beast, Book, Body
© Erica Jong
The white bed
in the green garden--
I looked forward
to sleeping alone
the way some long
for a lover.
The Christ upon the Hill
© William Cosmo Monkhouse
A couple old sat o'er the fire,
And they were bent and gray;
They burned the charcoal for their Lord,
Who lived long leagues away.
Always For The First Time
© André Breton
Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
By The Fireside : King Witlaf's Drinking-horn
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Witlaf, a king of the Saxons,
Ere yet his last he breathed,
To the merry monks of Croyland
His drinking-horn bequeathed,--
Cat's Dream
© Pablo Neruda
I have seen how the cat asleep
Would undulate, how the night flowed
Through it like dark water and at times,
It was going to fall or possibly
Plunge into the bare deserted snowdrifts.
