History poems
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O Sun of Real Peace.
© Walt Whitman
O SUN of real peace! O hastening light!
O free and extatic! O what I here, preparing, warble for!
O the sun of the world will ascend, dazzling, and take his heightand you too, O my
Ideal,
Song of the Universal.
© Walt Whitman
1
COME, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the Universal.
I was Looking a Long While.
© Walt Whitman
I WAS looking a long while for a clue to the history of the past for myself, and for these
chantsand now I have found it;
It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither accept nor reject;)
It is no more in the legends than in all else;
This Dust was Once the Man.
© Walt Whitman
THIS dust was once the Man,
Gentle, plain, just and resoluteunder whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of These States.
Passage to India.
© Walt Whitman
1
SINGING my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,
To a Historian.
© Walt Whitman
YOU who celebrate bygones!
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the racesthe life that has
exhibited itself;
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and
Plutonian Ode
© Allen Ginsberg
IWhat new element before us unborn in nature? Is there
a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative,
Scientific theme
Death & Fame
© Allen Ginsberg
When I die
I don't care what happens to my body
throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River
bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery
Players Ask For A Blessing On The Psalteries And On Themselves
© William Butler Yeats
First Voice. Maybe they linger by the way.
One gathers up his purple gown;
One leans and mutters by the wall -
He dreads the weight of mortal hours.
The Hour Before Dawn
© William Butler Yeats
And I will talk before I sleep
And drink before I talk.'
And he
Had dipped the wooden ladle deep
Into the sleeper's tub of beer
Had not the sleeper started up.
Three Marching Songs
© William Butler Yeats
Remember all those renowned generations,
They left their bodies to fatten the wolves,
They left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,
Fled to far countries, or sheltered themselves
In cavern, crevice, or hole,
Defending Ireland's soul.
Song Of One Of The Girls
© Dorothy Parker
Here in my heart I am Helen;
I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Stael;
I'm Salome, moon of the East.
Urbs Sacra Aeterna
© Oscar Wilde
Rome! what a scroll of History thine has been;
In the first days thy sword republican
Ruled the whole world for many an age's span:
Then of the peoples wert thou royal Queen,
Charmides
© Oscar Wilde
He was a Grecian lad, who coming home
With pulpy figs and wine from Sicily
Stood at his galley's prow, and let the foam
Blow through his crisp brown curls unconsciously,
And holding wave and wind in boy's despite
Peered from his dripping seat across the wet and stormy night.
Child of Europe
© Czeslaw Milosz
1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.
Who in May admire trees flowering
Are better than those who perished.
Fit the Fifth ( Hunting of the Snark )
© Lewis Carroll
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
Preface to Hunting of the Snark
© Lewis Carroll
If---and the thing is wildly possible---the charge of writing
nonsense were ever brought against the author of this brief but
instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line
Acrostic
© Lewis Carroll
Little maidens, when you look
On this little story-book,
Reading with attentive eye
Its enticing history,
Untitled
© Quincy Troupe
in brussels, eye sat in the grand place cafe & heard
duke's place, played after salsa
between the old majestic architecture, jazz bouncing off
all that gilded gold history snoring complacently there
Dreamwork Three
© Jerome Rothenberg
a trembling old man dreams of a chinese garden
a comical old man dreams of newspapers under his rabbi's hat
