Life poems
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The Broken Crutch: A Tale
© Robert Bloomfield
A burst of laughter rang throughout the hall,
And Peggy's tongue, though overborne by all,
Pour'd its warm blessings, for, without control
The sweet unbridled transport of her soul
Was obviously seen, till Herbert's kiss
Stole, as it were, the eloquence of bliss.
The Intruder
© John Betjeman
My mother—preferring the strange to the tame:
Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,
Cold Calls: War Music, Continued
© Christopher Logue
Take Quinamid
The son of a Dardanian astrologer
Who disregarded what his father said
And came to Troy in a taxi.
A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp
© Thomas Moore
Written at Norfolk, in Virginia
They made her a grave, too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And shes gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.
The Hill
© Nissim Ezekiel
Do not muse on it
from a distance:
it's not remote
for the view only,
it's for the sport
of climbing.
O Summer Sun!
© Robert Laurence Binyon
O summer sun, O moving trees!
O cheerful human noise, O busy glittering street!
What hour shall Fate in all the future find,
Or what delights, ever to equal these:
Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind,
Only to be alive, and feel that life is sweet?
The Sea of Death
© Thomas Hood
So lay they garmented in torpid light,
Under the pall of a transparent night,
Like solemn apparitions lulld sublime
To everlasting rest,and with them Time
Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face
Of a dark dial in a sunless place.
How Is It That the Snow by Robert Haight: American Life in Poetry #193 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
The first two lines of this poem pose a question many of us may have thought about: how does snow make silence even more silent? And notice Robert Haight's deft use of color, only those few flecks of red, and the rest of the poem pure white. And silent, so silent. Haight lives in Michigan, where people know about snow.
How Is It That the Snow
How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?
The God Called Poetry
© Robert Graves
Now I begin to know at last,
These nights when I sit down to rhyme,
A Summer Wish
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Live all thy sweet life through,
Sweet Rose, dew-sprent,
Commemoration
© Sir Henry Newbolt
I sat by the granite pillar, and sunlight fell
Where the sunlight fell of old,
And the hour was the hour my heart remembered well,
And the sermon rolled and rolled
As it used to roll when the place was still unhaunted,
And the strangest tale in the world was still untold.
Replica
© Marvin Bell
The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter
near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty
Inside My Head
© Robert Creeley
Inside my head a common room,
a common place, a common tune,
a common wealth, a common doom
Lines Suggested By The Last Words Of Berengarius. Ob. Anno Dom. 1088
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No more 'twixt conscience staggering and the Pope
Soon shall I now before my God appear,
By him to be acquitted, as I hope;
By him to be condemned, as I fear.--
March: An Ode
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
I
Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight,
