Life poems
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The Circus
© Kenneth Koch
Noel Lee was in Paris then but usually out of it
In Germany or Denmark giving a concert
As part of an endless activity
Which was either his career or his happiness or a combination of both
Or neither I remember his dark eyes looking he was nervous
With me perhaps because of our days at Harvard.
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
Locksley Hall
© Alfred Tennyson
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.
In The Harbour: Elegiac Verse
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I.
Peradventure of old, some bard in Ionian Islands,
Walking alone by the sea, hearing the wash of the waves,
Learned the secret from them of the beautiful verse elegiac,
Breathing into his song motion and sound of the sea.
Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain
© Dana Gioia
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
Mabel Martin
© John Greenleaf Whittier
PROEM.
I CALL the old time back: I bring my lay
in tender memory of the summer day
When, where our native river lapsed away,
The Fisherman's Tomb
© Sappho
Over the fisher Pelagon Meniscus his father set
The oar worn by the wave, the trap, and the fishing net;--
For all men, and for ever, memorials there to be
Of the luckless life of the fisher, the labourer of the sea.
Jock O The Side
© Andrew Lang
Now Liddisdale has ridden a raid,
But I wat they had better staid at hame;
For Mitchell o Winfield he is dead,
And my son Johnie is prisner tane?
With my fa ding diddle, la la dew diddle.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
© Walt Whitman
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Papyrus
© Eamon Grennan
Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples
draw the young men's rooster eyes
where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth,
breathing fire, holding for dear life.
Sonnets from the Portuguese 6: Go from me
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
The Little Old-Fashioned Church
© Edgar Albert Guest
THE little old-fashioned church, with the pews that were straight-backed and plain,
Where the sunbeams to worship came in through the windows that bore not a stain,
And the choir was composed of the good folks who toiled week-days in meadow and lane;
The Village: Book I
© George Crabbe
The village life, and every care that reigns
O'er youthful peasants and declining swains;
The Silent Tide
© David MacDonald Ross
So, to my heart, when the last sunray sleeps,
And the wan night, impatient for the moon,
Throws her gray mantle over land and sea,
There comes a call from out Life's nether deeps,
And tides, like some old ocean in a swoon,
Flow out, in soundless majesty, to thee.
Tam O 'Shanter
© Robert Burns
This truth fand honest Tam o' Shanter,
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter:
(Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses,
For honest men and bonie lasses.)
Sonnet. "If there were any power in human love"
© Frances Anne Kemble
If there were any power in human love,
Or in th' intensest longing of the heart,
From Lines to William Simson
© Robert Burns
Auld Coila now may fidge fu' fain,
She's gotten poets o' her ain—
Chiels wha their chanters winna hain,
But tune their lays,
Till echoes a' resound again
Her weel-sung praise.
