Great poems
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Laureate
© Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
DEATH met a little child who cried
For a bright star which earth denied,
And Death, so sympathetic, kissed it,
Saying: "With me
All bright things be!"--
And only the child's mother missed it.
A Wreath To The Fish
© Nancy Willard
Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth,
flat on my drainboard, dead asleep,
its suit of mail proof only against the stream?
What is it to live in a stream,
Sinfonia Eroica
© Amy Levy
(To Sylvia.)
My Love, my Love, it was a day in June,
A mellow, drowsy, golden afternoon;
And all the eager people thronging came
The Dead To Clemenceau:
© Robinson Jeffers
NOVEMBER, 1929
Come (we say) Clemenceau.
Why should you live longer than others? The vacuum that sucked
Us down, and the former stars, draws at you also.
"Do you remember still the little song"
© Lesbia Harford
Do you remember still the little song
I mumbled on the hill at Aura, how
I told you it was made for Katie's sake
When I was fresh from school and loving her
Ballade of an Omnibus
© Amy Levy
Princess, your splendour you require,
I, my simplicity; agree
Neither to rate lower nor higher.
An omnibus suffices me.
Ballade of a Special Edition
© Amy Levy
Fiend, get thee gone! no more repeat
Those sounds which do mine ears offend.
It is apocryphal, you cheat,
Your double murder in Mile End.
Charmians Song
© Aline Murray Kilmer
I'M glad I have but a little heart
For my heart is very small
It makes it free to come and go
And no one cares at all.
A Minor Poet
© Amy Levy
"What should such fellows as I do,
Crawling between earth and heaven?"
Here is the phial; here I turn the key
Sharp in the lock. Click!--there's no doubt it turned.
A Greek Girl
© Amy Levy
Alas, alas, such idle thoughts are vain!
O cruel, cruel sunlight, get thee gone!
O dear, dim shades of eve, come swiftly on!
That when quick lips, keen eyes, are closed in sleep,
Through the long night till dawn I then may weep.
A Farewell
© Amy Levy
The sad rain falls from Heaven,
A sad bird pipes and sings ;
I am sitting here at my window
And watching the spires of "King's."
Bakhchisaray
© Adam Mickiewicz
Those halls of the Gireys - still vast and great! -
Are galleries where desolation falls;
Those varicolored domes, those crumbling halls
Where proud pashas upon rich divans sate:
The Witch
© Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
I HAVE walked a great while over the snow,
And I am not tall nor strong.
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,
And the way was hard and long.
The Welcome
© Abraham Cowley
Go, let the fatted calf be kill'd;
My prodigal's come home at last,
With noble resolutions fill'd,
And fill'd with sorrow for the past:
No more will burn with love or wine;
But quite has left his women and his swine.
The Oak
© James Russell Lowell
What gnarled stretch, what depth of shade, is his!
There needs no crown to mark the forest's king;
