Great poems
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Giant Night
© Anne Waldman
Awake in a giant night
is where I am
There is a river where my soul,
hungry as a horse drinks beside me
The Stone Axe
© Robinson Jeffers
Iron rusts, and bronze has its green sickness; while flint, the hard stones, flint and chalcedony,
Cut the soft stream of time as if they were made for immortal uses. So the two-thousand-year-old
Foundations
© William Wilfred Campbell
So life and all its idols hath its hour,
Its fleet, ephemeral dream, its passing show,
Its pomp of fevered hopes that come and go:
Then stripped of vanity and folly's power,
Like some wide water bared to moon and star,
We know ourselves in truth for what we are.
The Ladder of St. Augustine
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!
The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea - Book The Fifth
© William Lisle Bowles
Such are thy views, DISCOVERY! The great world
Rolls to thine eye revealed; to thee the Deep
Grandfather Bridgeman
© George Meredith
'Heigh, boys!' cried Grandfather Bridgeman, 'it's time before dinner to-day.'
He lifted the crumpled letter, and thumped a surprising 'Hurrah!'
Up jumped all the echoing young ones, but John, with the starch in his throat,
Said, 'Father, before we make noises, let's see the contents of the note.'
The old man glared at him harshly, and twinkling made answer: 'Too bad!
John Bridgeman, I'm always the whisky, and you are the water, my lad!'
Three Women
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
My love is young, so young;
Young is her cheek, and her throat,
And life is a song to be sung
With love the word for each note.
The Fowls Flying In The Air
© John Bunyan
Methinks I see a sight most excellent,
All sorts of birds fly in the firmament:
Elspeth's Ballad
© Sir Walter Scott
The herring loves the merry moon-light,
The mackerel loves the wind,
But the oyster loves the dredging sang,
For they come of a gentle kind.
The Author
© Charles Churchill
Accursed the man, whom Fate ordains, in spite,
And cruel parents teach, to read and write!
Samuel Brown
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
He came with us to thy great gates, oh Thou
Unopened Age. Our noise was like the wind
Marys Wedding
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
The future I read in toil's guerdon,
You will read in your children's eyes:
The past--the same past with either--
Is to you a delightsome scene,
But I cannot trace it clearly
For the graves that rise between.
To the Poor
© Bliss William Carman
Child of distress, who meet’st the bitter scorn
Of fellow-men to happier prospects born,
Of The Nature Of Things: Book V - Part 04 - Formation Of The World
© Lucretius
But in what modes that conflux of first-stuff
Did found the multitudinous universe
A Sweet Contention Between Love, His Mistress, And Beauty
© Nicholas Breton
Love and my mistress were at strife
Who had the greatest power on me:
Betwixt them both, oh, what a life!
Nay, what a death is this to be!
On Reading Crowds and Power
© Geoffrey Hill
1
Cloven, we are incorporate, our wounds
simple but mysterious. We have
some wherewithal to bide our time on earth.
The Empty Glass
© Louise Gluck
I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.
The Bungalows
© John Ashbery
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
