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Tom Deadlight (1810)
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnought, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'-wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought.
Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For Ive received orders for to sail for the Deadman,
But hope with the grand fleet to see you again.
Ferdiah; Or, The Fight At The Ford
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Time is it, O Cuchullin, to arise,
Time for the fearful combat to prepare;
For hither with the anger in his eyes,
To fight thee comes Ferdiah called the Fair.
Annie Protheroe. A Legend of Stratford-le-Bow
© William Schwenck Gilbert
OH! listen to the tale of little ANNIE PROTHEROE.
She kept a small post-office in the neighbourhood of BOW;
She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day -
A gentle executioner whose name was GILBERT CLAY.
from Venus and Adonis
© William Shakespeare
Even as the sunne with purple-colourd face,
Had tane his last leaue of the weeping morne,
Rose-cheekt Adonis hied him to the chace,
Hunting he lou'd, but loue he laught to scorne,
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amaine vnto him,
And like a bold fac'd suter ginnes to woo him.
The Father of My Country
© Diane Wakoski
All fathers in Western civilization must have
a military origin. The
To My Old Oak Table
© Robert Bloomfield
Friend of my peaceful days! substantial friend,
Whom wealth can never change, nor int'rest bend,
Bologna: A Poem About Gold
© James Wright
She looks like only the heavy deep gold
That drags thrones down
All day long on the vine.
Mary in Bologna, sunlight I gathered all morning
And pressed in my hands all afternoon
And drank all day with my golden-breasted
Unknown Woman
© Alexander Blok
Above the restaurants in the evenings
The sultry air is wild and still,
And the decaying breath of spring
Drives drunken shouting.
Bread, Hashish And Moon
© Nizar Qabbani
When the moon is born in the east,
And the white rooftops drift asleep
Miranda’s Drowned Book
© Debora Greger
Perhaps not world enough, but I had time
to watch a hermit crab align himself
and back into a vacant whelk and haul
the home he wore from rocky A to B.
All that watching—watching for what? A sail
blown off its course by my uncalled-for sighs?
Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake,
Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn.
Little Nell
© Louisa May Alcott
GLEAMING through the silent church-yard,
Winter sunlight seemed to shed
Bahaman
© Bliss William Carman
To T. B. M.
IN the crowd that thronged the pierhead, come to see their friends take ship
Sleepers Awake
© John Ashbery
Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.
Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.
The Telephone
© Harriet Monroe
Your voice, beloved, on the living wire,
Borne to me by the spirit powerful
Childhood Stories
© Matthew Rohrer
They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium
and we all rose into the air,
