Great poems
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Griselda: A Society Novel In Verse - Chapter III
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
How long they sat thus silent who shall say?
Griselda knew not. Time was far away;
She wanted courage to prepare her heart
For that last bitterest word of all, ``We part.''
And he cared naught for time. His Heaven was there,
Nor needed thought, nor speech, nor even prayer.
Vigil
© Katharine Tynan
At night, when all the house is still,
Wide-waked the chairs and tables come
And yawn and stretch their limbs until
The maids appear with pan and broom.
Young Man by John Haines: American Life in Poetry #95 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Literature, and in this instance, poetry, holds a mirror to life; thus the great themes of life become the great themes of poems. Here the distinguished American poet, John Haines, addresses—and celebrates through the affirmation of poetry—our preoccupation with aging and mortality.
To The Negotiations In Kabul
© Joseph Brodsky
You, the brutal-hearted sky-scraping mountain tribes!
Lamb and horseflesh - is all your menu describes;
Long beards and handcrafted rugs, your loud guttural names;
Never before have seen a sea, not to mention a piano - in your eyes.
The Purple Thread
© Katharine Lee Bates
"The priests distributed various coloured silken threads to weave for the veil of the sanctuary; and it fell to Mary's lot to weave purple."
The Book of the Bee, ch. XXXIV.
The Washers of the Shroud
© James Russell Lowell
Along a riverside, I know not where,
I walked one night in mystery of dream;
A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,
To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam
Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.
Tekel
© Edith Nesbit
WHEN on the West broke light from out the East,
Then from the splendour and the shame of Rome--
"Up! Everything that God has made"
© Hans Adolph Brorson
Up! Everything that God has made,
His glory now be praising,
The smallest creature too is great,
And proves his might amazing.
The Irish Emigrants Mother
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
"Oh! come, my mother, come away, across the sea-green water;
Oh! come with me, and come with him, the husband of thy daughter;
Oh! come with us, and come with them, the sister and the brother,
Who, prattling climb thy ag'ed knees, and call thy daughter-mother.
Ode To Naples
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
EPODE 1a.
I stood within the City disinterred;
And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls
Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
The United Fruit Co.
© Pablo Neruda
Among the blood-thirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flow as though
on plates into the ships.
Edith: A Tale Of The Woods
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Thou'rt passing from the lake's green side,
And the hunter's hearth away;
For the time of flowers, for the summer's pride,
Daughter! thou canst not stay.
Winter the Season For the Exercise of Charity
© Eliza Cook
We know 'tis good that old Winter should come,
Roving awhile from his Lapland home;
'Tis fitting that we should hear the sound
Of his reindeer sledge on the slippery ground.
The Journey
© Charles Churchill
Some of my friends (for friends I must suppose
All, who, not daring to appear my foes,
Vanity of Vanities
© Michael Wigglesworth
Vain, frail, short liv'd, and miserable Man,
Learn what thou art when thine estate is best:
A restless Wave o'th' troubled Ocean,
A Dream, a lifeless Picture finely drest:
The Great Titanic
© Anonymous
It was on one Monday morning just about one o'clock
When that great Titanic began to reel and rock;
People began to scream and cry,
Saying, "Lord, am I going to die?"
The Clock of The Universe
© George MacDonald
A clock aeonian, steady and tall,
With its back to creation's flaming wall,
From 'The Clouds'
© Sandor Petofi
SORROW? A GREAT OCEAN.
Joy?
A little pearl in the ocean.Perhaps,
By the time I fish it up, I may break it.
