Great poems
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The Negro Mother
© Langston Hughes
Three hundred years in the deepest South:
But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth .
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
Now, through my children, I'm reaching the goal.
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 2. The Musician's Tale; The Ballad of Carmilhan - IV.
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And now along the horizon's edge
Mountains of cloud uprose,
Black as with forests underneath,
Above their sharp and jagged teeth
Were white as drifted snows.
Avarice
© George Herbert
Money, thou bane of blisse, and source of wo,
Whence com'st thou, that thou art so fresh and fine?
I know thy parentage is base and low:
Man found thee poore and dirtie in a mine.
Let America Be America Again
© Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
On The Porch At The Frost Place, Franconia, N. H.
© William Matthews
So here the great man stood,
fermenting malice and poems
we have to be nearly as fierce
against ourselves as he
Misgivings
© William Matthews
"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,
Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog
© William Matthews
Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleep
with a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleep
to the dark of waking up I'll never know;
History of the Twentieth Century (A Roadshow)
© Joseph Brodsky
Ladies and gentlemen and the day!
All ye made of sweet human clay!
Let me tell you: you are o'kay.
To The Right Honourable The Lady Penelope Dowager Of The Late Vis-Count Bayning
© William Strode
You know that Friends have Eares as well as Eyes,
We heare Hee's well and Living, that well dies.
Ugolino
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Now had the loophole of that dungeon, still
Which bears the name of Famine's Tower from me,
And where tis fit that many another will
Song Of The Redwood-Tree
© Walt Whitman
A prophecy and indirection-a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air;
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing-or hamadryads departing;
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.
The Great Sunset
© Robinson Jeffers
A flight of six heavy-motored bombing-planes
Went over the beautiful inhuman ridges a straight course northward;
My Love Is Like To Ice
© Edmund Spenser
My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
On The Yong Baronett Portman Dying Of An Impostume In's Head
© William Strode
Is Death so cunning now that all her blowe
Aymes at the heade? Doth now her wary Bowe
Make surer worke than heertofore? The steele
Slew warlike heroes onely in the heele.
On The Death Of The Right Honourable The Lord Viscount Bayning
© William Strode
Though after Death, Thanks lessen into Praise,
And Worthies be not crown'd with gold, but bayes;
Shall we not thank? To praise Thee all agree;
We Debtors must out doe it, heartily.
On The Death Of Sir Thomas Lea
© William Strode
You that affright with lamentable notes
The servants from their beef, whose hungry throats
Vex the grume porter's surly conscience:
That blesse the mint for coyning lesse than pence:
On The Death Of Mrs. Mary Neudham
© William Strode
As sinn makes gross the soule and thickens it
To fleshy dulness, so the spotless white
Of virgin pureness made thy flesh as cleere
As others soules: thou couldst not tarry heere
