Hope poems
/ page 384 of 439 /
Old Dr. Valentine To His Son
© Ogden Nash
Your hopeless patients will live,
Your healthy patients will die.
I have only this word to give:
Wonder, and find out why
Look What You Did, Christopher!
© Ogden Nash
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Someone sailed the ocean blue.
Somebody borrowed the fare in Spain
For a business trip on the bounding main,
I Do, I Will, I Have
© Ogden Nash
How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations
© Robert Frost
You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
Epitaph On Miss Stanley, In Holyrood Church, Southampton
© James Thomson
E. S.
Once a lively image of human nature,
The Old-Home Folks
© James Whitcomb Riley
Who shall sing a simple ditty all about the Willow,
Dainty-fine and delicate as any bending spray
That dandles high the happy bird that flutters there to trill a
Tremulously tender song of greeting to the May.
Among All Lovely Things My Love Had Been
© William Wordsworth
AMONG all lovely things my Love had been;
Had noted well the stars, all flowers that grew
About her home; but she had never seen
A glow-worm, never one, and this I knew.
The Narrow Way
© Anne Brontë
Believe not those who say
The upward path is smooth,
Lest thou shouldst stumble in the way,
And faint before the truth.
King Borria Bungalee Boo
© William Schwenck Gilbert
KING BORRIA BUNGALEE BOO
Was a man-eating African swell;
His sigh was a hullaballoo,
His whisper a horrible yell -
A horrible, horrible yell!
Laughter And Tears IX
© Khalil Gibran
As the Sun withdrew his rays from the garden, and the moon threw cushioned beams upon the flowers, I sat under the trees pondering upon the phenomena of the atmosphere, looking through the branches at the strewn stars which glittered like chips of silver upon a blue carpet; and I could hear from a distance the agitated murmur of the rivulet singing its way briskly into the valley.
When the birds took shelter among the boughs, and the flowers folded their petals, and tremendous silence descended, I heard a rustle of feet though the grass. I took heed and saw a young couple approaching my arbor. The say under a tree where I could see them without being seen.
Heart And Mind
© Dame Edith Sitwell
Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time-
'The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps...so is the heart
If This Were All
© Edgar Albert Guest
If this were all of life we'll know,
If this brief space of breath
Children's Party
© Ogden Nash
May I join you in the doghouse, Rover?
I wish to retire till the party's over.
Since three o'clock I've done my best
To entertain each tiny guest. My conscience now I've left behind me,
Scars on Paper
© Marilyn Hacker
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
Invocation
© Marilyn Hacker
This is for Elsa, also known as Liz,
an ample-bosomed gospel singer: five
discrete malignancies in one full breast.
This is for auburn Jacqueline, who is
Desesperanto
© Marilyn Hacker
After Joseph RothParce que c'était lui; parce que c'était moi.
Montaigne, De L'amitiëThe dream's forfeit was a night in jail
and now the slant light is crepuscular.
Papers or not, you are a foreigner
The Voice of Toil
© William Morris
I heard men saying, Leave hope and praying,
All days shall be as all have been;
To-day and to-morrow bring fear and sorrow,
The never-ending toil between.
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (excerpt)
© William Morris
"When thou hearest the fool rejoicing, and he saith, 'It is over and past,
And the wrong was better than right, and hate turns into love at the last,
And we strove for nothing at all, and the Gods are fallen asleep;
For so good is the world a-growing that the evil good shall reap:'
Then loosen thy sword in the scabbard and settle the helm on thine head,
For men betrayed are mighty, and great are the wrongfully dead.
The Earthly Paradise: The Lady of the Land
© William Morris
The ArgumentA certain man having landed on an island in the Greek sea, found there a beautifuldamsel, whom he would fain have delivered from a strange & dreadful doom, butfailing herein, he died soon afterwards.
It happened once, some men of Italy
Midst the Greek Islands went a sea-roving,
And much good fortune had they on the sea:
