Great poems
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Paradise Lost: Book I (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despare:
And him thus answer'd soon his bold Compeer.
Under The Rose
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Oh the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.
The Hunting of the Snark
© Lewis Carroll
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
Amen
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
It is over. What is over?
Nay, now much is over truly!
Harvest days we toiled to sow for;
Now the sheaves are gathered newly,
Now the wheat is garnered duly.
Alfs Eleventh Bit
© Ezra Pound
My great press cleaves the guts of men,
My great noise drowns their cries,
My sales beat all the other ten,
Because I print most lies.
Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings
© Robert Bly
We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
Metropolitan
© John Fuller
In cities there are tangerine briefcases on the down-platform
and jet parkas on the up-platform; in the mother of cities
there is equal anxiety at all terminals.
West a business breast, North a morose jig, East a false
Caroline Chisholm
© Henry Kendall
THE PRIESTS and the Levites went forth, to feast at the courts of the Kings;
They were vain of their greatness and worth, and gladdened with glittering things;
They were fair in the favour of gold, and they walked on, with delicate feet,
Where, famished and faint with the cold, the women fell down in the street.
The Bloody Sire
© Robinson Jeffers
It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.
Frost at Midnight
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Naucratia; Or Naval Dominion. Part III.
© Henry James Pye
Arm'd in her cause, on Chalgrave's fatal plain,
Where sorrowing Freedom mourns her Hambden slain,
Say, shall the moralizing bard presume
From his proud hearse to tear one warlike plume,
Because a Cæsar or a Cromwell wore
An impious wreath, wet with their country's gore?
Tithonus
© Alfred Tennyson
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
Delia I
© Samuel Daniel
Unto the boundless Ocean of thy beauty
Runs this poor river, charged with streams of zeal:
The Death Of Conradin
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
No cloud to dim the splendour of the day
Which breaks o'er Naples and her lovely bay,
And lights that brilliant sea and magic shore
With every tint that charmed the great of yore-
The imperial ones of earth, who proudly bade
Their marble domes e'en Ocean's realm invade.
Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough
© Matthew Arnold
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear."
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 3. The Landlord's Tale; The Rhyme of Sir Christopher
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It was Sir Christopher Gardiner,
Knight of the Holy Sepulchre,
From Merry England over the sea,
Who stepped upon this continent
As if his august presence lent
A glory to the colony.
Along The Stream
© Madison Julius Cawein
Where the violet shadows brood
Under cottonwoods and beeches,
Through whose leaves the restless reaches
Of the river glance, I've stood,
While the red-bird and the thrush
Set to song the morning hush.
