Great poems
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Millenial Hymn to Lord Shiva
© Kathleen Raine
Earth no longer
hymns the Creator,
the seven days of wonder,
the Garden is over
A Ballad Of The French Fleet. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The Fifth)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A fleet with flags arrayed
Sailed from the port of Brest,
Robert the Bruce (To Douglas in Dying)
© Edwin Muir
'MY life is done, yet all remains,
The breath has gone, the image not,
Homer's Hymn To The Moon
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Son of Saturn with this glorious Power
Mingled in love and sleep--to whom she bore
Pandeia, a bright maid of beauty rare
Among the Gods, whose lives eternal are.
Freedom
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
I care not who were vicious back of me,
No shadow of their sins on me is shed.
My will is greater than heredity.
I am no worm to feed upon the dead.
Moonlight
© Victoria Mary Sackville-West
- Then earth's great architecture swells
Among her mountains and her fells
Under the moon to amplitude
Massive and primitive and rude:
East And West
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
The Day has never understood the Gloaming or the Night;
Though sired by one Creative Power, and nursed at Nature's breast;
The White Man ever fails to read the Dark Man's heart aright;
Though from the self-same Source they came, upon the self-same quest;
So deep and wide, the Great Divide,
Between the East and West.
Beneath Thy Cross
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood's slow loss,
And yet not weep?
The Perfect High
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
"Well, that is that," says Baba Fats, sitting back down on his stone,
Facing another thousand years of talking to God alone.
"It seems, Lord", says Fats, "its always the same, old men or brighteyed youth,
Its always easier to sell them some shit than it is to give them the truth."
St. Jeanne Rides Out (for Amy Lowell)
© Margaret Widdemer
St. Jeanne she sat with Michaël,
With Marguerite and Raphaël,
The Scoffer
© Edgar Albert Guest
If I had lived in Franklin's time I'm most afraid that I,
Beholding him out in the rain, a kite about to fly,
And noticing upon its tail the barn door's rusty key,
Would, with the scoffers on the street, have chortled in my glee;
And with a sneer upon my lips I would have said of Ben,
"His belfry must be full of bats. He's raving, boys, again!"
Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Poca favilla gran fliamma seconda. - Dante
Ogni altra cosa, ogni pensier va fore,
E sol ivi con voi rimansi amore. - Petrarca
High Talk
© William Butler Yeats
PROCESSIONS that lack high stilts have nothing that
catches the eye.
The Youth of England To Garibaldi's Legend
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
O ye who by the gaping earth
Where, faint with resurrection, lay
An empire struggling into birth,
Her storm-strown beauty cold with clay,
The free winds round her flowery head,
Her feet still rooted with the dead,
The Southerly Buster
© Henry Lawson
There's a wind that blows out of the South in the drought,
And we pray for the touch of his breath
Cousin Kate
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
I was a cottage maiden
Hardened by sun and air
Contented with my cottage mates,
Not mindful I was fair.
Reynard the Fox - Part 1
© John Masefield
Poor Polly's dying struck him queer,
He was a darkened man thereafter,
Cowed, silent, he would wince at laughter
And be so gentle it was strange
Even to see. Life loves to change.
A Sophistical Argument
© Lesbia Harford
Great crane o'ertopping the delicate trees
Why do you seem so fair,
Swaying and raising your load with ease
High in the misty air?
In The Manner Of G.S.
© Giorgos Seferis
Strange people! they say they're in Attica but they're really nowhere;
they buy sugared almonds to get married
they carry hair tonic, have their photographs taken
the man I saw today sitting against a background of pigeons and flowers
let the hands of the old photographer smoothe away the
wrinkles left on his face by all the birds in the sky.
The Great Grey Plain
© Henry Lawson
Out West, where the stars are brightest,
Where the scorching north wind blows,
And the bones of the dead gleam whitest,
And the sun on a desert glows --
