Life poems
/ page 454 of 844 /
The School Where I Studied
© Yehuda Amichai
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
Louisa To Strephon
© Jonathan Swift
Ah! Strephon, how can you despise
Her, who without thy pity dies!
To Strephon I have still been true,
And of as noble blood as you;
The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn
© Andrew Marvell
I in a golden vial will
Keep these two crystal tears, and fill
It till it do o’erflow with mine,
Then place it in Diana’s shrine.
A Greeting
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Thrice welcome from the Land of Flowers
And golden-fruited orange bowers
The Reading Club
© Patricia Goedicke
Is dead serious about this one, having rehearsed it for two weeks
they bring it right into the Odd Fellows Meeting Hall.
Riding the backs of the Trojan Women,
In Euripides’ great wake they are swept up,
A Wedding
© James Tate
She was in terrible pain the whole day,
as she had been for months: a slipped disc,
and there is nothing more painful. She
Three Songs at the End of Summer
© Jane Kenyon
A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.
L'Envoi
© James Russell Lowell
Whether my heart hath wiser grown or not,
In these three years, since I to thee inscribed,
Meary-Anns Child
© William Barnes
Meary-Ann wer alwone wi' her beäby in eärms,
In her house wi' the trees over head,
Vor her husban' wer out in the night an' the storms,
In his business a-tweilèn vor bread;
An' she, as the wind in the elems did roar,
Did grievy vor Robert all night out o' door.
Sonnet CXI: O, for my Sake do you with Fortune Chide
© William Shakespeare
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
Waiting
© William Ernest Henley
A square, squat room (a cellar on promotion),
Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight;
Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware;
Scissors and lint and apothecary's jars.
Complaint of the Absence of Her Love Being Upon the Sea
© Henry Howard
O happy dames, that may embrace
The fruit of your delight,
From The Spanish Cancioneros
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
II.
Some day, some day
O troubled breast,
Shalt thou find rest.
Seele im Raum
© Randall Jarrell
It is over.
It is over so long that I begin to think
That it did not exist, that I have never—
And my son says, one morning, from the paper:
“An eland. Look, an eland!”
—It was so.
A Ballad of François Villon, Prince of All Ballad-Makers
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
The Tickle
© Gamaliel Bradford
I like to read confessions
As lengthy as Rousseau's,
With all their slow processions
Of innumerable woes.
Address For The Opening Of The Fifth Avenue Theatre
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
HANG out our banners on the stately tower
It dawns at last--the long-expected hour!
The steep is climbed, the star-lit summit won,
The builder's task, the artist's labor done;
Before the finished work the herald stands,
And asks the verdict of your lips and hands!
Messiah (Christmas Portions)
© Mark Doty
A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:
"The Old Psalm Tune"
© Harriet Beecher Stowe
You asked, dear friend, the other day,
Why still my charmed ear
Rejoiceth in uncultured tone
That old psalm tune to hear?
