Hope poems
/ page 233 of 439 /
The Loneliness of the Military Historian
© Margaret Atwood
But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
The Lady’s Dressing Room
© Jonathan Swift
Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
[The Doleful Lay of Clorinda]
© Mary Sidney Herbert
Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain,
That may compassion my impatient grief?
Tho Lack of Laurels and of Wreaths Not One
© Trumbull Stickney
Tho lack of laurels and of wreaths not one
Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet
The Rain-bow
© Thomas Love Peacock
The day has pass’d in storms, though not unmix’d
With transitory calm. The western clouds,
To My Father on His Birthday
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Amidst the days of pleasant mirth,
That throw their halo round our earth;
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
Paradise Lost: Book VII (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
DEscend from Heav'n Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine
Sonnet: I Thank You
© Henry Timrod
I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
Stanzas ["Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!"]
© Harriet Beecher Stowe
Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!
I will not ask a dearer bliss;
Come with the starry beams, my love,
And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.
For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop
© David Wagoner
I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open
Vaguely and gradually go sliding
Granddaughter
© Robinson Jeffers
And heres a portrait of my granddaughter Una
When she was two years old: a remarkable painter,
Lincoln
© Delmore Schwartz
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—
from The Triumph of Love
© Geoffrey Hill
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
The Waste Carpet
© William Matthews
O California, sportswear
and defense contracts, gasses that induce
deference, high school girls
with their own cars, we wanted
to love you without pain.
The Princess: Tears, Idle Tears
© Alfred Tennyson
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
