History poems
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Louvain 19
© Robert Laurence Binyon
ii
But from that blood, those ashes there arose
Not hoped-for terror cowering as it ran,
But divine anger flaming upon those
Defamers of the very name of man,
The Destruction Of Magdeburg.
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[For a fine account of the fearful sack of Magdeburg,
by Tilly, in the year 1613, see SCHILLER's History of the Thirty
Years' War.]
The Day of Hope
© Shams al-Din Hafiz
THE days of absence and the bitter nights
Of separation, all are at an end!
Where is the influence of the star that blights
My hope? The omen answers: At an end!
Millenial Hymn to Lord Shiva
© Kathleen Raine
Earth no longer
hymns the Creator,
the seven days of wonder,
the Garden is over
For all the Land to See: A Song of the Tools
© Henry Lawson
THE CROSS-CUT and the crowbar cross, and hang them on the wall,
And make a greenhide rack to fit the wedges and the maul,
The done long-handled shovel and the thong-bound axe that fell,
The crowbar, pick-axe and the throwthe axe that morticed well.
The old patched tent and fly, bag bunk and pillow of sugee,
The frying-pan and billy-can, for all the land to see.
The Youth of England To Garibaldi's Legend
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
O ye who by the gaping earth
Where, faint with resurrection, lay
An empire struggling into birth,
Her storm-strown beauty cold with clay,
The free winds round her flowery head,
Her feet still rooted with the dead,
The Star of Australasia
© Henry Lawson
We boast no more of our bloodless flag, that rose from a nation's slime;
Better a shred of a deep-dyed rag from the storms of the olden time.
From grander clouds in our `peaceful skies' than ever were there before
I tell you the Star of the South shall rise -- in the lurid clouds of war.
Hermann And Dorothea - V. Polyhymnia
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE COSMOPOLITE.
BUT the Three, as before, were still sitting and talking together,
The Fagot
© Jonathan Swift
Observe the dying father speak:
Try, lads, can you this bundle break?
Then bids the youngest of the six
Take up a well-bound heap of sticks.
O Black And Unknown Bards
© James Weldon Johnson
O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
Orlie Wilde
© James Whitcomb Riley
A goddess, with a siren's grace,-
A sun-haired girl on a craggy place
Above a bay where fish-boats lay
Drifting about like birds of prey.
An Arundel Tomb
© Philip Larkin
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Dear Reader
© William Taylor Collins
Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.
Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax
© Andrew Marvell
Within this sober Frame expect
Work of no Forrain Architect;
That unto Caves the Quarries drew,
And Forrests did to Pastures hew;
The Child Of The Islands - Winter
© Caroline Norton
I.
ERE the Night cometh! On how many graves
Rests, at this hour, their first cold winter's snow!
Wild o'er the earth the sleety tempest raves;
The Star-Apple Kingdom
© Derek Walcott
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
Scenic Route
© Lisel Mueller
Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.
Curriculum Vitae
© Lisel Mueller
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of
course I do not remember this.
