Great poems
/ page 283 of 549 /
from A Ballad Upon A Wedding
© Sir John Suckling
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen;
Oh, things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at wake, or fair.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 121
© Alfred Tennyson
Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done:
Romans in Dorset: A.D. MDCCCXCV
© Louise Imogen Guiney
A stupor on the heath,
And wrath along the sky;
Space everywhere; beneath
A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high.
Mingus in Diaspora
© William Matthews
You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out,
like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon,
or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost,
who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus.
A Prayer for My Daughter
© William Butler Yeats
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
Winter Dawn
© Kenneth Slessor
At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane
A port to see—water breathing in the air,
Blackberrying
© Sylvia Plath
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
The Cab Driver Who Ripped Me Off
© Cornelius Eady
That’s right, said the cab driver,
Turning the corner to the
The South
© Emma Lazarus
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.
The Ragpickers' Wine
© Charles Baudelaire
In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood,
Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood,
As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass,
Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass,
The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany
© Carl Sandburg
(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.)
Be sad, be cool, be kind,
remembering those now dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies,
solemn bones under the smooth blue sea,
faces warblown in a falling rain.
How We Were Introduced
© Zbigniew Herbert
—for perfidious protectors
I was playing in the street
no one paid attention to me
as I made forms out of sand
mumbling Rimbaud under my breath
A Modest Love
© Sir Edward Dyer
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
And love is love, in beggars as in kings.
A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687
© John Dryden
Stanza 4
The soft complaining flute
In dying notes discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers,
Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute.
This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
A.M. Fog
© Mark Jarman
Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking,
Holding on with dissolving hands,
Out of it came, not a line of old men,
But pairs of headlights, delaying morning.
Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites
© Charles Simic
They also piss against the wind,
Pour water in a leaky bucket.
Strike two tears to make fire,
And have tongues with bones in them,
Bones of a wolf gnawed by lambs.
Autumn Sky
© Charles Simic
In my great grandmother's time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.
