Great poems
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Voyages
© Hart Crane
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
The Lilies Of The Field
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Flowers! when the Saviour's calm benignant eye
Fell on your gentle beauty; when from you
Phantasmagoria Canto I (The Trystyng )
© Lewis Carroll
ONE winter night, at half-past nine,
Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy,
I had come home, too late to dine,
And supper, with cigars and wine,
Was waiting in the study.
The King Of Brentfords Testament
© William Makepeace Thackeray
The noble King of Brentford
Was old and very sick,
He summon'd his physicians
To wait upon him quick;
They stepp'd into their coaches
And brought their best physick.
A Day on the Big Branch
© Howard Nemerov
Still half drunk, after a night at cards,
with the grey dawn taking us unaware
Prayer
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Give us the open mind, O God,
The mind that dares believe
In paths of thought as yet untrod;
The mind that can conceive
Large visions of a wider way
Than circumscribes our world to-day.
Psalm I.
© John Milton
Bless'd is the man who hath not walk'd astray
In counsel of the wicked, and ith'way
Of sinners hath not stood, and in the seat
Of scorners hath not sate. But in the great
My Mother-Land
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Death! What of death?--
Can he who once drew honorable breath
In liberty's pure sphere,
Foster a sensual fear,
When death and slavery meet him face to face,
Pretty
© Stevie Smith
Why is the word pretty so underrated?
In November the leaf is pretty when it falls
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry: American Life in Poetry #17 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureat
© Ted Kooser
Nearly all of us spend too much of our lives thinking about what has happened, or worrying about what's coming next. Very little can be done about the past and worry is a waste of time. Here the Kentucky poet Wendell Berry gives himself over to nature.
The Peace of Wild Things
Sonnet VII: How soon hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth
© Patrick Kavanagh
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
Chateau Gaillard
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Shattered tower and desolated keep
Darken; far below the river shines
Under cliffs that round the twilight sweep,
Rock--rough headlands on the sky's confines
Couch asleep.
Paschal
© Robert Pinsky
Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great
Flight
© Boris Pasternak
Yesterday my wife held me here
as I thrashed and moaned, her hand
in my foaming mouth, and my son
saw what he was warned he might.
Dairy Ode
© James McIntyre
Our muse it doth refuse to sing
Of cheese made early in the spring,
When cows give milk from spring fodder
You cannot make a good cheddar.
Lawyer and Child
© James Whitcomb Riley
How large was Alexander, father,
That parties designate
The historic gentleman as rather
Inordinately great?
Thanatopsis
© William Cullen Bryant
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
Of Coarse Fools
© Sebastian Brant
Vile, scolding words do irritate,
Good manners thereby will abate
If sow-bell's rung from morn to late.
Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi.
"O Cæsar, we who are about to die
Salute you!" was the gladiators' cry
In the arena, standing face to face
With death and with the Roman populace.
