Great poems
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Song for Ishtar
© Denise Levertov
The moon is a sow
and grunts in my throat
Her great shining shines through me
so the mud of my hollow gleams
and breaks in silver bubbles
Marlburyes Fate
© Benjamin Tompson
When London's fatal bills were blown abroad
And few but Specters travel'd on the road,
Q & A
© Kenneth Fearing
Where analgesia may be found to ease the infinite, minute scars of the day;
What final interlude will result, picked bit by bit from the morning's hurry, the lunch-hour boredom, the fevers of the night;
Why this one is cherished by the gods, and that one not;
How to win, and win again, and again, staking wit alone against a sea of time;
Which man to trust and, once found, how far—
Recollections of the Arabian Nights
© Alfred Tennyson
When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
My Grandmother's Love Letters
© Hart Crane
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
Paradise Lost: Book XI (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
He added not, for Adam at the newes
Heart-strook with chilling gripe of sorrow stood,
That all his senses bound; Eve, who unseen
Yet all had heard, with audible lament
Discover'd soon the place of her retire.
Paradise Lost: Book IX
© Patrick Kavanagh
So gloz'd the Tempter, and his proem tun'd.
Into the heart of Eve his words made way,
Though at the voice much marvelling; at length,
Not unamaz'd, she thus in answer spake:
Omens
© Yusef Komunyakaa
Her eyelids were painted blue.
When she closed her eyes the sea
rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots,
The Passing Show
© Ambrose Bierce
I
I know not if it was a dream. I viewed
A city where the restless multitude,
Between the eastern and the western deep
Had reared gigantic fabrics, strong and rude.
Charms for Love
© Pierre Reverdy
Sweet boy
don't send so much longing—
send a little less
and come with it yourself
Moral Lessons From Natural Facts
© Confucius
All true words fly, as from yon reedy marsh
The crane rings o'er the wild its screaming harsh.
Vainly you try reason in chains to keep;--
Freely it moves as fish sweeps through the deep.
Poems
© Anselm Hollo
i
thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.
ii
The Three Graves. A Fragment Of A Sexton's Tale
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The grapes upon the Vicar's wall
Were ripe as ripe could be;
And yellow leaves in sun and wind
Were falling from the tree.
Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd.
© Pierre de Ronsard
And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?
The Universal Prayer
© Alexander Pope
Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
English Eclogues I - The Old Mansion-House
© Robert Southey
STRANGER.
Old friend! why you seem bent on parish duty,
Breaking the highway stones,--and 'tis a task
Somewhat too hard methinks for age like yours.
Home
© Edgar Albert Guest
It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,
A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam
Conscription Camp
© Ishmael Reed
Your landscape sickens with a dry disease
Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines
Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars
Are of a child’s height in these battlefields.
Of Love To God
© John Bunyan
When I do this begin to apprehend,
My heart, my soul, and mind, begins to bend
