Great poems
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The speech of silence
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
The solemn Sea of Silence lies between us;
I know thou livest, and them lovest me,
And yet I wish some white ship would come sailing
Across the ocean, beating word from thee.
The Angels
© William Henry Drummond
Run, shepherds, run where Bethlehem blest appears.
We bring the best of news; be not dismayed:
The Prarie Battlements
© Vachel Lindsay
Alice has a prarie grave.
The King and Queen lie low,
And aged Grandma Silver Dreams,
Four toombstones in a row.
But still in snow and sunshine
Stands our ancestral hall.
The Ideal
© Charles Harpur
Spirit of Dreams! When many a toilsome height
Shut paradise from exiled Adams sight,
The Perfect Marriage
© Vachel Lindsay
I hate this yoke; for the world's sake here put it on:
Knowing 'twill weigh as much on you till life is gone.
Knowing you love your freedom dear, as I love mine
Knowing that love unchained has been our life's great wine:
Our one great wine (yet spent too soon, and serving none;
Of the two cups free love at last the deadly one).
Rondel of Merciless Beauty
© Geoffrey Chaucer
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.
Genesis
© Vachel Lindsay
O Eve with the fire-lit breast
And child-face red and white!
I heaped the great logs high!
That was our bridal night.
The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race
© Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERYFat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
A deep rolling bass.
Death and Birth
© George MacDonald
Welcome, friend! Bring in your bricks.
Mortar there? No need to mix?
That is well. And picks and hammers?
Verily these are no shammers!-
There, my friend, build up that niche,
That one with the painting rich!
A Song to a Tree
© Edwin Markham
Give me the dance of your boughs, O tree,
Whenever the wild wind blows;
And when the wind is gone, give me
Your beautiful repose.
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
© Vachel Lindsay
IT is portentious, and a thing of state
That here at midnight, in our little town
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,
Near the old court-house, pacing up and down.
An Exotic
© Henry Timrod
Not in a climate near the sun
Did the cloud with its trailing fringes float,
Whence, white as the down of an angel's plume,
Fell the snow of her brow and throat.
With Scindia to Delphi
© Rudyard Kipling
More than a hundred years ago, in a great battle fought near Delhi,
an Indian Prince rode fifty miles after the day was lost
with a beggar-girl, who had loved him and followed him in all his camps,
on his saddle-bow. He lost the girl when almost within sight of safety.
Brave Boys Are They!
© Henry Clay Work
Brave boys are they!
Gone at their country's call;
And yet, and yet we cannot forget
That many brave boys must fall.
White Horses
© Rudyard Kipling
Where run your colts at pasture?
Where hide your mares to breed?
'Mid bergs about the Ice-cap
Or wove Sargasso weed;
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
When the Great Ark
© Rudyard Kipling
When the Great Ark, in Vigo Bay,
Rode stately through the half-manned fleet,
From every ship about her way
She heard the mariners entreat--
Before we take the seas again
Let down your boats and send us men!
