Great poems
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The Jingo and the Minstrel
© Vachel Lindsay
AN ARGUMENT FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE AND GOODWILL WITH THE JAPANESE PEOPLEGlossary for the uninstructed and the hasty: Jimmu Tenno, ancestor of all the Japanese Emperors; Nikko, Japan's loveliest shrine; Iyeyasu, her greatest statesman; Bushido, her code of knighthood; The Forty-seven Ronins, her classic heroes; Nogi, her latest hero; Fuji, her most beautiful mountain.
"Now do you know of Avalon
That sailors call Japan?
She holds as rare a chivalry
Song. "Nonot to win the world's applause"
© Frances Anne Kemble
Nonot to win the world's applause
Would I be great or good or wise;
This, My Song, Is Made For Kerensky
© Vachel Lindsay
Hail the Russian picture around the little box:
Exiles,
Troops in files,
Generals in uniform,
Mujiks in their smocks,
And holy maiden soldiers who have cut away their locks.
Where Is David, the Next King of Israel?
© Vachel Lindsay
Where is David? . . . O God's people,
Saul has passed, the good and great.
Mourn for Saul the first-anointed
Head and shoulders o'er the state.
Above the Battle's Front
© Vachel Lindsay
St. Francis, Buddha, Tolstoi, and St. John
Friends, if you four, as pilgrims, hand in hand,
Returned, the hate of earth once more to dare,
And walked upon the water and the land,
In Praise of Songs that Die
© Vachel Lindsay
AFTER HAVING READ A GREAT DEAL OF GOOD CURRENT POETRY IN THE MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS
Ah, they are passing, passing by,
Wonderful songs, but born to die!
Cries from the infinite human seas,
Blanche Sweet
© Vachel Lindsay
MOVING-PICTURE ACTRESS(After seeing the reel called "Oil and Water.")
Beauty has a throne-room
In our humorous town,
Spoiling its hob-goblins,
The Spice-Tree
© Vachel Lindsay
The deep roots whisper,
The branches say:
"Love to-morrow,
And love to-day,
And till Heaven's day,
And till Heaven's day."
The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos
© Vachel Lindsay
The wide Pacific waters
And the Atlantic meet.
With cries of joy they mingle,
In tides of love they greet.
Virginia
© Thomas Babbington Macaulay
Fragments of a Lay Sung in the Forum on the Day Whereon Lucius Sextius Sextinus Lateranus and Caius Licinius Calvus Stolo Were Elected Tribunes of the Commons the Fifth Time, in the Year of the City CCCLXXXII.
Ye good men of the Commons, with loving hearts and true,
Niagara
© Vachel Lindsay
IWithin the town of Buffalo
Are prosy men with leaden eyes.
Like ants they worry to and fro,
(Important men, in Buffalo.)
Marmion: Introduction to Canto V.
© Sir Walter Scott
When dark December glooms the day,
And takes our autumn joys away;
The Tree of Laughing Bells
© Vachel Lindsay
Like a diver after pearls
I plunged to that stifling floor.
It was wide as a giant's wheat-field
An icy, wind-washed shore.
O laughing, proud, but trembling star!
O wind that wounded sore!
The Gamblers
© Vachel Lindsay
Life's a jail where men have common lot.
Gaunt the one who has, and who has not.
All our treasures neither less nor more,
Bread alone comes thro' the guarded door.
Epitaphs For Two Players
© Vachel Lindsay
Yorick is dead. Boy Hamlet walks forlorn
Beneath the battlements of Elsinore.
Where are those oddities and capers now
That used to "set the table on a roar"?
Nothing Is Indispensable
© Piet Hein
The universe may
be as great as they say.
But it wouldn't be missed
if it didn't exist.
What the Moon Saw
© Vachel Lindsay
Two statesmen met by moonlight.
Their ease was partly feigned.
They glanced about the prairie.
Their faces were constrained.
On Reading Omar Khayyam
© Vachel Lindsay
[During an anti-saloon campaign, in central Illinois.]
In the midst of the battle I turned,
(For the thunders could flourish without me)
And hid by a rose-hung wall,
The Light o' the Moon
© Vachel Lindsay
The moon's a peck of corn. It lies
Heaped up for me to eat.
I wish that I might climb the path
And taste that supper sweet.
Milton--December 9, 1608: December 9, 1908
© George Meredith
Homage to him
His debtor band, innumerable as waves
Running all golden from an eastern sun,
Joyfully render, in deep reverence
Subscribe, and as they speak their Milton's name,
Rays of his glory on their foreheads bear.
