Great poems
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Thoughtless Cruelty
© Charles Lamb
There, Robert, you have kill'd that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you've taken to supply,
You could not do it.
The Cave Painters
© Eamon Grennan
Holding only a handful of rushlight
they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch
Satire III
© John Donne
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids
Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids;
Poste Restante
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
I want you to know how it was,
whether the Cross grinds into dust
under men’s wheels or shines brightly
as a monument to a new era.
Paradise Lost: Book X
© Patrick Kavanagh
So having said, he thus to Eve in few:
"Say, Woman, what is this which thou hast done?"
To whom sad Eve, with shame nigh overwhelm'd,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge
Bold or loquacious, thus abash'd replied,
"The Serpent me beguil'd, and I did eat."
The Right Whale in Iowa
© Debora Greger
The shag rug of a Great Plains buffalo,
a flightless bird
gone to stone: over its fellow keepsakes,
Lines
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
At the Portals of the Future,
Full of madness, guilt and gloom,
Stood the hateful form of Slavery,
Crying, Give, Oh! give me room
Upon the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough
© Andrew Marvell
TO THE LORD FAIRFAX
See how the archèd earth does here
Beowulf (modern English translation)
© Pierre Reverdy
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
Fog
© Louise Imogen Guiney
Thy mood with man’s is broken and blent in,
City of Stains! And ache of thought doth drown
The primitive light in which thy life began;
Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,
Greater and elder yet the love of man
Full in thy look, tho’ the dark visor’s down.
The Erotic Philosophers
© John Betjeman
It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window
As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine.
Chomei at Toyama
© Ted Hughes
Swirl sleeping in the waterfall!
On motionless pools scum appearing
disappearing!
In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See . . .
© Gaius Valerius Catullus
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
Dream Song 14
© John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Constantinople
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Greiv'd at a view which strikes vpon my Mind
The short liv'd Vanity of Human kind
In Gaudy Objects I indulge my Sight,
And turn where Eastern Pomp gives gay delight.
Song of the Two Crows
© Hayden Carruth
I sing of Morrisville
(if you call this cry
a song). I
(if you call this painful
Lincoln, Man of the People
© Edwin Markham
When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour
Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,
Encounter in the Local Pub
© Hugo Williams
Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history.
—Overheard remark
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,
