Great poems

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The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun

© Stephen Vincent Benet

No herbage broke the barren flats of land,
No winds dared loiter within smiling trees,
Nor were there any brooks on either hand,
Only the dry, bright sand,
Naked and golden, lay before the seas.

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Death

© John Clare

Why should man's high aspiring mind

Burn in him with so proud a breath,

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Road and Hills

© Stephen Vincent Benet

I shall go away
To the brown hills, the quiet ones,
The vast, the mountainous, the rolling,
Sun-fired and drowsy!

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Ring the Bell, Watchman!

© Henry Clay Work

High is the belfry the old sexton stands,
Grasping the rope with his thin bony hands;
Fix'd is his gaze, as by some magic spell,
Till he hears the distant murmmer,
Ring, ring the bell.

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Portrait of a Boy

© Stephen Vincent Benet

After the whipping he crawled into bed,
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping.
How funny uncle's hat had looked striped red!
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping

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May Morning

© Stephen Vincent Benet

This is the time of all-sufficing laughter
At idiotic things some one has done,
And there is neither past nor vague hereafter.
And all your body stretches in the sun
And drinks the light in like a liquid thing;
Filled with the divine languor of late spring.

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Love in Twilight

© Stephen Vincent Benet

There is darkness behind the light -- and the pale light drips
Cold on vague shapes and figures, that, half-seen loom
Like the carven prows of proud, far-triumphing ships --
And the firelight wavers and changes about the room,

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Going Back to School

© Stephen Vincent Benet

The boat ploughed on. Now Alcatraz was past
And all the grey waves flamed to red again
At the dead sun's last glimmer. Far and vast
The Sausalito lights burned suddenly

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Sir Barnaby Bampton Boo

© William Schwenck Gilbert

This is SIR BARNABY BAMPTON BOO,

Last of a noble race,

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Alexander VI Dines with the Cardinal of Capua

© Stephen Vincent Benet

Next, then, the peacock, gilt
With all its feathers. Look, what gorgeous dyes
Flow in the eyes!
And how deep, lustrous greens are splashed and spilt
Along the back, that like a sea-wave's crest
Scatters soft beauty o'er th' emblazoned breast!

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A Minor Poet

© Stephen Vincent Benet

Others with subtle hands may pluck the strings,
Making even Love in music audible,
And earth one glory. I am but a shell
That moves, not of itself, and moving sings;
Leaving a fragrance, faint as wine new-shed,
A tremulous murmur from great days long dead.

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The Givers Of Life

© Bliss William Carman

I.
WHO called us forth out of darkness and gave us the gift of life,
Who set our hands to the toiling, our feet in the field of strife?
Darkly they mused, predestined to knowledge of viewless things,

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The Show

© Wilfred Owen

My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.

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Greater Love

© Wilfred Owen

Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

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Asleep

© Wilfred Owen

Under his helmet, up against his pack,
After the many days of work and waking,
Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.
And in the happy no-time of his sleeping,

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Work For Woman

© Wilcox Ella Wheeler

Woman, sitting at your ease,

In the midst of luxuries,

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Smile, Smile, Smile

© Wilfred Owen

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;

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A Poor Christian Looks At The Ghetto

© Czeslaw Milosz


I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.
He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch
Who has sat much in the light of candles
Reading the great book of the species.

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The Send-Off

© Wilfred Owen

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

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To Mr. Vaughan, Silurist on His Poems

© Katherine Philips

Had I ador'd the multitude, and thence
Got an antipathy to wit and sence,
And hug'd that fate, in hope the world would grant
'Twas good -- affection to be ignorant;