History poems
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Astrophel and Stella
© Sir Philip Sidney
Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes entendeth,
Which now my breast, surcharg'd, to musick lendeth!
To you, to you, all song of praise is due,
Only in you my song begins and endeth.
Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law
© Adrienne Rich
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."
Power
© Adrienne Rich
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
In Those Years
© Adrienne Rich
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
Paul Revere's Ride
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
The Breast of the Sea
© Syl Cheney-Coker
After our bloody century, the sea will groan
under its weight, somewhere between breasts and anus.
The Animals Sick of the Plague
© Wright Elizur
The sorest ill that Heaven hath Sent on this lower world in wrath,-- The plague (to call it by its name,) One single day of which Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,-- Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame
The Prelude: Book 2: School-time (Continued)
© William Wordsworth
Thus far, O Friend! have we, though leaving muchUnvisited, endeavour'd to retraceMy life through its first years, and measured backThe way I travell'd when I first beganTo love the woods and fields; the passion yetWas in its birth, sustain'd, as might befal,By nourishment that came unsought, for still,From week to week, from month to month, we liv'dA round of tumult: duly were our gamesProlong'd in summer till the day-light fail'd;No chair remain'd before the doors, the benchAnd threshold steps were empty; fast asleepThe Labourer, and the old Man who had sate,A later lingerer, yet the revelryContinued, and the loud uproar: at last,When all the ground was dark, and the huge cloudsWere edged with twinkling stars, to bed we went,With weary joints, and with a beating mind
flood archeology
© Williams Julia
in ten thousand years a shoewill emerge from bog mudcracked, seamy leatherunlaced and tiny
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
© Alfred Tennyson
Late, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts,Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII [all 133 poems]
© Alfred Tennyson
[Preface] Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace,Believing where we cannot prove;
The universe is as close as the veins in your neck
© Sullivan Rosemary
The angle seemed askew,an enigmatic grin hangingat the end of the highway,a last orange gasp.
Passe-Port
© Sullivan Rosemary
We pass the turnstileinto your country.The computer spits you out --You're no longer on its mind.
The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto 12
© Edmund Spenser
THE SECOND BOOKE OF THE FAERIE QUEENEContayningTHE LEGEND OF SIR GUYON,OR OF TEMPERAUNCE
