Great poems
/ page 311 of 549 /
Retreat
© John Fuller
I should like to live in a sunny town like this
Where every afternoon is half-day closing
And I would wait at the terminal for the one train
Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving.
To A Young Gentleman In Love. A Tale
© Matthew Prior
From publick Noise and factious Strife,
From all the busie Ills of Life,
Rule Britannia
© James Thomson
When Britain first, at heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain—
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves."
The Song of a Prison
© Henry Lawson
Tis a song of the weary warders, whom prisoners call the screws
A class of men who I fancy would cleave to the Evening News.
They look after their treasures sadly. By the screw of their keys they are known,
And they screw them many times daily before they draw their own.
My mother’s body
© Marge Piercy
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
Sea Longings
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The first world-sound that fell upon my ear
Was that of the great winds along the coast
For Four Guilds: IV. The Bell-Ringers
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The angels are singing like birds in a tree
In the organ of good St. Cecily:
Eclogue 4: Pollio
© Publius Vergilius Maro
Muses of Sicily, essay we now
A somewhat loftier task! Not all men love
Coppice or lowly tamarisk: sing we woods,
Woods worthy of a Consul let them be.
The Great Palaces of Versailles
© Rita Dove
Nothing nastier than a white person!
She mutters as she irons alterations
An Ode to Himself
© Benjamin Jonson
Where dost thou careless lie,
Buried in ease and sloth?
Knowledge that sleeps doth die;
And this security,
It is the common moth
That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.
Fame
© Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall
HAVE I played fellowship with night, to see
The allied armies break our gates at dawn
The Wild Swans at Coole
© William Butler Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
My Beloved Is Mine, And I Am His
© Francis Quarles
EV'N like two little bank-dividing brooks,
That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks,
Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
Where in a greater current they conjoyn:
So I my best-beloved's am; so he is mine.
A Une Femme
© Paul Verlaine
To you these lines for the consoling grace
Of your great eyes wherein a soft dream shines,
For your pure soul, all-kind!-to you these lines
From the black deeps of mine unmatched distress.
Thanksgiving
© Bliss William Carman
I thank thee, Earth, for water good,
The sea's great bath of buoyant green
Or the cold mountain torrent's flood,
That I may keep this body clean.
The Weather-Prophet
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
A Fable.
"WHAT can the matter be with the thermometer?
Is it the sun or the moon or the comet, or
Something broke loose in the old earth's pedometer?"
Monte Cassino. Terra Di Lavoro. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Fourth)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Beautiful valley! through whose verdant meads
Unheard the Garigliano glides along;--
The Liris, nurse of rushes and of reeds,
The river taciturn of classic song.
Sonnet. "Spirit of all sweet sounds! who in mid air"
© Frances Anne Kemble
Spirit of all sweet sounds! who in mid air
Sittest enthroned, vouchsafe to hear my prayer!
The Mariner's Cave
© Jean Ingelow
Once on a time there walked a mariner,
That had been shipwrecked;-on a lonely shore,
And the green water made a restless stir,
And a great flock of mews sped on before.
He had nor food nor shelter, for the tide
Rose on the one, and cliffs on the other side.
