Knowledge poems
/ page 39 of 75 /
Experience
© Jane Taylor
--A COSTLY good ; that none e'er bought or sold
For gem, or pearl, or miser's store, twice told :
Save certain watery pearls, possessed by all,
Which, one by one, may buy it as they fall.
Of these, though precious, few will not suffice,
So slow the traffic, and so large the price !
The Grave
© Robert Blair
While some affect the sun, and some the shade,
Some flee the city, some the hermitage;
Their aims as various, as the roads they take
In journeying through life;the task be mine,
The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun
© Stephen Vincent Benet
No herbage broke the barren flats of land,
No winds dared loiter within smiling trees,
Nor were there any brooks on either hand,
Only the dry, bright sand,
Naked and golden, lay before the seas.
A Confession
© Peter McArthur
DEAR little boy, with wondering eyes
That for the light of knowledge yearn,
The Givers Of Life
© Bliss William Carman
I.
WHO called us forth out of darkness and gave us the gift of life,
Who set our hands to the toiling, our feet in the field of strife?
Darkly they mused, predestined to knowledge of viewless things,
The Debate Between Villon And His Heart
© Francois Villon
Who's that I hear?It's meWho?Your heart
Hanging on by the thinnest thread
I lose all my strength, substance, and fluid
When I see you withdrawn this way all alone
The Vanity Of Human Wishes
© Michael Wigglesworth
I walk'd and did a little Mole-hill view
Full peopled with a most industrious crew
For Osip Mandelstam
© Anna Akhmatova
And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
Four Quartets 2: East Coker
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Ash Wednesday
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
you shall above all things... (22)
© Edward Estlin Cummings
you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear
it will become you;and if you are glad
Tomes
© Billy Collins
There is a section in my library for death
and another for Irish history,
a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan,
and in the center a row of imperturbable reference books,
With The Face
© Laura Riding Jackson
With the face goes a mirror
As with the mind a world.
Likeness tells the doubting eye
That strangeness is not strange.
The Man of Law's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
1. Plight: pulled; the word is an obsolete past tense from
"pluck."
The Knight's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
Upon that other side, Palamon,
When that he wist Arcita was agone,
Much sorrow maketh, that the greate tower
Resounded of his yelling and clamour
The pure* fetters on his shinnes great *very
Were of his bitter salte teares wet.
Not Youth Pertains to Me.
© Walt Whitman
NOT youth pertains to me,
Nor delicatesseI cannot beguile the time with talk;
Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant;
In the learnd coterie sitting constraind and stillfor learning. inures
Prayer of Columbus.
© Walt Whitman
A BATTERD, wreckd old man,
Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,
Pent by the sea, and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,
Sore, stiff with many toils, sickend, and nigh to death,
To Oratists.
© Walt Whitman
TO oratiststo male or female,
Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine power to use words.
Are you full-lungd and limber-lippd from long trial? from vigorous practice?
from
