Life poems
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To A Woman Of Malabar
© Charles Baudelaire
Your feet are as slender as hands, your hips, to me,
wide enough for the sweetest white girls envy:
to the wise artist your body is sweet and dear,
and your great velvet eyes black without peer.
Dead Love
© Mathilde Blind
He stung him mid the roses' purple bloom,
The Rose of roses, yea, a thing so sweet,
Haply to stay blind Change's flying feet,
And stir with pity the unpitying tomb.
Here, take him, cold, cold, heavy and void of breath!
Nor me refuse, O Mother almighty, death.
The Skylark
© Edith Nesbit
"It is the skylark come." For shame!
Robert-a-Cockney is thy name:
Robert-a-Field would surely know
That skylarks, bless them, never go!
Leave Me A Place Underground
© Pablo Neruda
Leave me a place underground, a labyrinth,
where I can go, when I wish to turn,
without eyes, without touch,
in the void, to dumb stone,
or the finger of shadow.
Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision In A Dream. A Fragment
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Charades
© Charles Stuart Calverley
Spake John Grogblossom the coachman to Eliza Spinks the cook:
"Mrs. Spinks," says he, "I've foundered: 'Liza dear, I'm overtook.
Druv into a corner reglar, puzzled as a babe unborn;
Speak the word, my blessed 'Liza; speak, and John the coachman's yourn."
Sonnet CI: The One Hope
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
When vain desire at last and vain regret
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What Mr. Robinson Thinks
© James Russell Lowell
Guvener B. is a sensible man;
He stays to his home an' looks arter his folks;
An Ode - Humbly Inscribed To The Queen, On the Glorious Success of Her Majesty's Arms
© Matthew Prior
When great Augustus govern'd ancient Rome,
And sent his conquering bands to foreign wars,
Sonnet I: Love Enthroned
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I marked all kindred Powers the heart finds fair:
Truth, with awed lips; and Hope, with eyes upcast;
A Warm House And A Ruddy Fire
© Edgar Albert Guest
A warm house and a ruddy fire,
To what more can man aspire?
Sonnet Written On A Fly-Leaf Of "The Rubaiyat" Of Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer-Poet Of Persia.
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
WHO deems the soul to endless death is thrall,
That no life breathes beyond that moment dire,
When every sense seems lost as outblown fire;
The Prologues Of Euripides
© Aristophanes
_AEschylus_--And by Jove, I'll not stop to cut up your verses
word by word, but if the gods are propitious I'll spoil
all your prologues with a little flask of smelling-salts.
Love-Song
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
If Death should claim me for her own to-day,
And softly I should falter from your side,
Queen Galena, Or The Sultan Betrayed
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
HOLD! let the heartless perjurer go!
Speak not! strike not! he is my foe,
From me, me only, comes the blow--
I will repay him woe for woe;
The Brook
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
BUT yesterday this brook was bright,
And tranquil as the clear moonlight,
That wooes the palms on Orient shores,
But now, it hoarse, dark stream, it pours
The Muses Threnodie: Fifth Muse
© Henry Adamson
Yet bold attempt and dangerous, said I,
Upon these kinde of men such chance to try,
Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet by Anne Caston: American Life in Poetry #45 Ted Kooser, U.S.
© Ted Kooser
Poets are experts at holding mirrors to the world. Here Anne Caston, from Alaska, shows us a commonplace scene. HavenÃt we all been in this restaurant for the Sunday buffet? Caston overlays the picture with language that, too, is ordinary, even sloganistic, and overworn. But by zooming in on the joint of meat and the belly-up fishes floating in
butter, she compels us to look more deeply into what is before us, and a room that at first seemed humdrum becomes rich with inference.
