Great poems
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Psalm 150
© Mary Sidney Herbert
Oh, laud the Lord, the God of hosts commend,
Exalt his pow’r, advance his holiness:
Granddaughter
© Robinson Jeffers
And heres a portrait of my granddaughter Una
When she was two years old: a remarkable painter,
Lincoln
© Delmore Schwartz
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
from The Triumph of Love
© Geoffrey Hill
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
Songs from the Plays - “When that I was and a little tiny boy”
© William Shakespeare
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
Prodigal
© Richard Jones
You could drive out of this country
and attack the world with your ambition,
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
The World Is Too Much With Us
© André Breton
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
This Room and Everything in It
© Li-Young Lee
Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.
The Secular Masque
© John Dryden
JANUS
Since Momus comes to laugh below,
Old Time begin the show,
That he may see, in every scene,
What changes in this age have been,
Ellen West
© Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
The Haunted Oak
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
Prodigy
© Charles Simic
It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.
Sun and Moon
© Jane Kenyon
For Donald Clark
Drugged and drowsy but not asleep
I heard my blind roommate's daughter
helping her with her meal:
“What's that? Squash?”
“No. It's spinach.”
