Great poems
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The Magyar's New-Year-Eve
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
By Temèsvar I hear the clarions call:
The year dies. Let it die. It lived in vain.
Gun booms to gun along the looming wall,
Another year advances o'er the plain.
The Despot hails it from his bannered keep:
Ah, Tyrant, is it well to break a bondsman's sleep?
from The Shepheardes Calender: April
© Edmund Spenser
THENOT & HOBBINOLL
Tell me good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?
What? hath some Wolfe thy tender Lambes ytorne?
Or is thy Bagpype broke, that soundes so sweete?
Or art thou of thy loved lasse forlorne?
Creole
© Robert Pinsky
I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat
In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.
Two Songs Of A Fool
© William Butler Yeats
A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And seep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.
The Demoniac of Gadara
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A GADARENE.
He hath escaped, hath plucked his chains asunder,
And broken his fetters; always night and day
Is in the mountains here, and in the tombs,
Crying aloud, and cutting himself with stones,
Exceeding fierce, so that no man can tame him!
Trilogy Of Passion 01 To Werther
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The farewell sunbeams bless'd our ravish'd view;
Fate bade thee go,-to linger here was mine,-
Going the first, the smaller loss was thine.
Aspromonte
© Alfred Austin
So you think he is defeated, O ye comfortably seated,
And that Victory is meted in your loaded huckster's scales?
O ye fools! though justice tarry, yet by heaven broad and starry,
Right, howe'er it may miscarry, ere the end arrive, prevails.
Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
The Child Of The Islands - Autumn
© Caroline Norton
I.
BROWN Autumn cometh, with her liberal hand
Binding the Harvest in a thousand sheaves:
A yellow glory brightens o'er the land,
Imitations of Horace
© Alexander Pope
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
Lying
© Lola Ridge
To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
The Hackney Coachman: Or the Way to Get a Good Fare
© Erica Jong
I am a bold Coachman, and drive a good hack,
With a coat of five capes that quite covers my back;
And my wife keeps a sausage-shop, not many miles
From the narrowest alley in all Broad St Giles.
The Circus
© Kenneth Koch
Noel Lee was in Paris then but usually out of it
In Germany or Denmark giving a concert
As part of an endless activity
Which was either his career or his happiness or a combination of both
Or neither I remember his dark eyes looking he was nervous
With me perhaps because of our days at Harvard.
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
Locksley Hall
© Alfred Tennyson
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.
Hunting Manual
© Hugo Williams
Look then for the blank card, the sprung trap,
the net’s dissolve, the unburdened
line that swings free in the air.
There. By day, go empty-handed to the hunt
and come home the same way
in the dark.
In The Harbour: Elegiac Verse
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I.
Peradventure of old, some bard in Ionian Islands,
Walking alone by the sea, hearing the wash of the waves,
Learned the secret from them of the beautiful verse elegiac,
Breathing into his song motion and sound of the sea.
Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain
© Dana Gioia
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
Sonnet XXXV: And Yet I Cannot
© Samuel Daniel
And yet I cannot reprehend the flight,
Or blame th'attempt presuming so to soar;
