Great poems
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Corn
© Sidney Lanier
I wander to the zigzag-cornered fence
Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense,
Contests with stolid vehemence
The march of culture, setting limb and thorn
As pikes against the army of the corn.
Slowly the Black Earth Gains
© George Santayana
Slowly the black earth gains upon the yellow,
And the caked hill-side is ribbed soft with furrows.
Turn now again, with voice and staff, my ploughman,
Guiding thy oxen.
Herod
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
The Virgin speaks Draw back the starry curtains of the night,
O Cherubim, and Seraphim!
Pull back the purple curtains of the night,
For I would look once more upon the world,
That ere my sorrows made some young delight
In bird and bee and each earth-flower uncurled.
A Florida Sunday.
© Sidney Lanier
From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas
Oft come repenting tempests here to die;
Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies,
They shrive to priestly pines with many a sigh,
A Florida Ghost.
© Sidney Lanier
Down mildest shores of milk-white sand,
By cape and fair Floridian bay,
Twixt billowy pines -- a surf asleep on land --
And the great Gulf at play,
The Wood Giant
© John Greenleaf Whittier
From Alton Bay to Sandwich Dome,
From Mad to Saco river,
For patriarchs of the primal wood
We sought with vain endeavor.
The Vixen
© John Clare
Among the taller wood with ivy hung,
The old fox plays and dances round her young.
She snuffs and barks if any passes by
And swings her tail and turns prepared to fly.
A Short Song of Congratulation
© Samuel Johnson
LONG-EXPECTED one and twenty
Ling'ring year at last has flown,
Pomp and pleasure, pride and plenty
Great Sir John, are all your own.
A Grey Day
© Roderic Quinn
THE long still day is ending
In hollow and on height,
The lighthouse seaward sending
White rays of steady light;
Snow
© Edward Thomas
In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying: "Oh,
October
© Edward Thomas
The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, --
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
Enslaved
© Claude McKay
Oh when I think of my long-suffering race,
For weary centuries despised, oppressed,
Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place
In the great life line of the Christian West;
Toys
© Margaret Widdemer
SHE loves the flowers, the wind that bends the fir;
When the Spring comes she dances; and her mirth
Italy : 8. The Brothers
© Samuel Rogers
In the same hour the breath of life receiving,
They came together and were beautiful;
But, as they slumbered in their mother's lap,
How mournful was their beauty! She would sit,
Rutherford McDowell
© Edgar Lee Masters
They brought me ambrotypes
Of the old pioneers to enlarge.
And sometimes one sat for me
Some one who was in being
William Jones
© Edgar Lee Masters
Once in a while a curious weed unknown to me,
Needing a name from my books;
Once in a while a letter from Yeomans.
Out of the mussel-shells gathered along the shore
Integrity
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Immortal life is something to be earned,
By slow, self-conquest, comradeship with pain,
