Great poems
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England's Answer
© Rudyard Kipling
Truly ye come of The Blood; slower to bless than to ban;
Little used to lie down at the bidding of any man.
Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare;
Stark as your sons shall be - stern as your fathers were.
Spring
© William Wilfred Campbell
There dwells a spirit in the budding year-
As motherhood doth beautify the face-
Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)
© Anne Sexton
Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
Those Foreign Engineers
© Henry Lawson
Old Ivan McIvanovitch, with knitted brow of care,
Has climbed up from the engine-room to get a breath of air;
He slowly wipes the grease and sweat from hairy face and neck.
And from beneath his bushy brows he glowers around the deck.
Bellerophon
© George Meredith
Maimed, beggared, grey; seeking an alms; with nod
Of palsy doing task of thanks for bread;
Upon the stature of a God,
He whom the Gods have struck bends low his head.
45 Mercy Street
© Anne Sexton
In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
The Starry Night
© Anne Sexton
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
Courage
© Anne Sexton
It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
Idea LI: Calling to mind since first my love begun
© Michael Drayton
Calling to mind since first my love begun,
Th' incertain times oft varying in their course,
Now to be Still and Rest
© Peder Kofod Trojel
Now to be still and rest, while the heart remembers
All that is learned and loved in the days of long past,
To stoop and warm our hands at the fallen embers,
Glad to have come to the long ways end at last.
Parnell's Funeral
© William Butler Yeats
The rest I pass, one sentence I unsay.
Had de Valera eaten parnell's heart
No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day.
No civil rancour torn the land apart.
One Day
© Rupert Brooke
So lightly I played with those dark memories,
Just as a child, beneath the summer skies,
Plays hour by hour with a strange shining stone,
For which (he knows not) towns were fire of old,
And love has been betrayed, and murder done,
And great kings turned to a little bitter mould.
Overture To A Dance Of Locomotives
© William Carlos Williams
Men with picked voices chant the names
of cities in a huge gallery: promises
that pull through descending stairways
to a deep rumbling.
Ode To Dragon
© Hannah More
Dragon! since lyrics are the mode,
To thee I dedicate my Ode,
And reason good I plead:
Are those who cannot write, to blame
To draw their hopes of future fame,
From those who cannot read?
He Had So Much Work To Do
© Henry Lawson
Jim was trucking for a sawmill to make money for the home,
He was making, out of Mudgee, for the family to come,
And a load-chain snapped the switch-bar, and Black Anderson found Jim,
In the morning, in a creek-bed, with a log on top of him.
The Horse And The Olive: Or, War And Peace
© Thomas Parnell
With Moral Tale let Ancient Wisdom move,
Which thus I sing to make the Moderns wise:
Psalm LXXXVIII. (88)
© John Milton
Lord God that dost me save and keep,
All day to thee I cry;
And all night long, before thee weep
Before thee prostrate lie.
