Life poems
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Rhoecus
© James Russell Lowell
God sends his teachers unto every age,
To every clime, and every race of men,
The White Ship Henry I. Of England.25th November 1120
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
By none but me can the tale be told,
The butcher of Rouen, poor Berold.
Lovesong
© Ted Hughes
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
The Champion
© Edith Nesbit
Young and a conqueror, once on a day,
Wild white Winter rode out this way;
With his sword of ice and his banner of snow
Vanquished the Summer and laid her low.
Keep To The Right
© Edgar Albert Guest
KEEP to the right is the rule of the road,
Keep to the right as you travel along,
Undesired Revenge
© Robert Fuller Murray
Sorrow and sin have worked their will
For years upon your sovereign face,
My Father Teaches Me to Dream by Jan Beatty: American Life in Poetry #72 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laure
© Ted Kooser
Those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s have a tough, no-nonsense take on what work is. If when I was young I'd told my father I was looking for fulfilling work, he would have looked at me as if I'd just arrived from Mars. Here the Pennsylvania poet, Jan Beatty, takes on the voice of her father to illustrate the thinking of a generation of Americans.
A Worn-Out Pencil
© James Whitcomb Riley
Welladay!
Here I lay
You at rest--all worn away,
O my pencil, to the tip
Of our old companionship!
The Smoke Off
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
In the laid back California town of sunny San Rafael
Lived a girl named Pearly Sweetcake, you probly knew her well.
Shed been stoned fifteen of her eighteen years and the story was widely told
That she could smoke 'em faster than anyone could roll.
A Rhymed Lesson (Urania)
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Are angel faces, silent and serene,
Bent on the conflicts of this little scene,
Whose dream-like efforts, whose unreal strife,
Are but the preludes to a larger life?
Sonnet 92: "But do thy worst to steal thyself away,..."
© William Shakespeare
But do thy worst to steal thyself away,
For term of life thou art assured mine;
When Ragyng Loue With Extreme Payne
© Henry Howard
When ragyng loue with extreme payne
Most cruelly distrains my hart:
In Pearl And Gold
© Madison Julius Cawein
WHEN pearl and gold, o'er deeps of musk,
The moon curves, silvering the dusk,
As in a garden, dreaming,
A lily slips its dewy husk
Scenes Favourable To Meditation
© William Cowper
Wilds horrid and dark with o'er shadowing trees,
Rocks that ivy and briers infold,
Scenes nature with dread and astonishment sees,
But I with a pleasure untold;
Properzia Rossi
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Tell me no more, no more
Of my soul's lofty gifts! Are they not vain
Requiescat In Pace
© Jean Ingelow
O my heart, my heart is sick awishing and awaiting:
The lad took up his knapsack, he went, he went his way;
And I looked on for his coming, as a prisoner through the grating
Looks and longs and longs and wishes for its opening day.
The Progress Of Refinement. Part I.
© Henry James Pye
Rous'd by those honors cull'd by Glory's hand
To dress the Victor on the Olympic sand,
With active toil each ardent stripling tries
To bind his forehead with the immortal prize;
Hence strength and beauty deck the Grecian race,
And manly labor gives them manly grace.
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe
© Edmund Spenser
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe
THe shepheards boy (best knowen by that name)
Hadji Dimiter
© Hristo Botev
He lives, still he lives! In the mountain fast,
soaked in blood, he lies and groans,
a rebel, wounded in the chest,
a rebel, young and with a manly strength.
