Morning poems
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Prejudice
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
How strangely blind is prejudice, the Negro's greatest foe!
It never fails to see the wrong but naught of good can know.
'Tis blind to all that's lofty, yea, to truth it is opposed,
Degrading things will ope his eyes, while good will keep them closed.
Voyages
© Hart Crane
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
The Flâneur
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Boston Common, December 6, 1882 during the Transit of Venus
I love all sights of earth and skies,
The Cry Of A Lost Soul
© John Greenleaf Whittier
In that black forest, where, when day is done,
With a snake's stillness glides the Amazon
Darkly from sunset to the rising sun,
The King Of Brentfords Testament
© William Makepeace Thackeray
The noble King of Brentford
Was old and very sick,
He summon'd his physicians
To wait upon him quick;
They stepp'd into their coaches
And brought their best physick.
A Day on the Big Branch
© Howard Nemerov
Still half drunk, after a night at cards,
with the grey dawn taking us unaware
Five Visions of Captain Cook
© Kenneth Slessor
Two chronometers the captain had,
One by Arnold that ran like mad,
One by Kendal in a walnut case,
Poor devoted creature with a hangdog face.
Epilogue: To A Mother
© Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
On seeing her smile repeated in her daughter's eyes
Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation
© Alexander Pope
As some fond virgin, whom her mothers care
Drags from the town to wholesome country air,
Elegy (“Who keeps the owl’s breath?”)
© David St. John
—Tacitus
Who keeps the owl’s breath? Whose eyes desire?
Why do the stars rhyme? Where does
The flush cargo sail? Why does the daybook close?
The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants
© Paul Muldoon
At four in the morning he wakes
to the yawn of brakes,
Ode For September
© Robert Laurence Binyon
On that long day when England held her breath,
Suddenly gripped at heart
And called to choose her part
Between her loyal soul and luring sophistries,
When From The Sod The Flow'rets Spring
© Walther von der Vogelweide
When from the sod the flow'rets spring,
And smile to meet the sun's bright ray,
In The Night
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Where art thou, thou lost face,
Which, yet a little while, wert making mirth
At these new years which seemed too sad to be?
Where art thou fled which for a minute's space
The Family Fool
© William Schwenck Gilbert
Oh! a private buffoon is a light-hearted loon,
If you listen to popular rumour;
Flight
© Boris Pasternak
Yesterday my wife held me here
as I thrashed and moaned, her hand
in my foaming mouth, and my son
saw what he was warned he might.
'39'
© Henry Lawson
Then heres the living Forties!
The Forties! The Forties!
Then heres the living Forties!
Were good for ten years more.
Thanatopsis
© William Cullen Bryant
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi.
"O Cæsar, we who are about to die
Salute you!" was the gladiators' cry
In the arena, standing face to face
With death and with the Roman populace.
