Peace poems
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At The Banquet To the Japanese Embassy
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
WE welcome you, Lords of the Land of the Sun!
The voice of the many sounds feebly through one;
Ah! would 't were a voice of more musical tone,
But the dog-star is here, and the song-birds have flown.
Alsace-Lorraine
© George Meredith
Yet the like aerial growths may chance be the delicate sprays,
Infant of Earth's most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal
For entry on Life's upper fields: and soul thus flourishing pays
The martyr's penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.
The School-Mistress
© William Shenstone
Auditae voces, vagitus et ingens,
Infantunque animae flentes in limine primo. ~ Virg.
The Wind And The Whirlwind
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
I have a thing to say. But how to say it?
I have a cause to plead. But to what ears?
How shall I move a world by lamentation,
A world which heeded not a Nation's tears?
Childhood. (From The Danish)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There was a time when I was very small,
When my whole frame was but an ell in height;
Sweetly, as I recall it, tears do fall,
And therefore I recall it with delight.
Above The Storm
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
THE winds of the winter have breathed their dirges
Far over the wood and the leaf-strown plain;
They have passed, forlorn, by the mountain verges
Down to the shores of the moaning main;
The Grave Of Howard
© William Lisle Bowles
Spirit of Death! whose outstretched pennons dread
Wave o'er the world beneath their shadow spread;
Italy : 36. The Nun
© Samuel Rogers
'Tis over; and her lovely cheek is now
On her hard pillow -- there, alas, to be
Nightly, through many and many a dreary hour,
Wan, often wet with tears, and (ere at length
Turning Forty by Kevin Griffith: American Life in Poetry #13 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
Birthdays, especially those which mark the passage of a decade, are occasions not only for celebration, but for reflection. In "Turning Forty," Ohio poet Kevin Griffith conveys a confusion of sentiments. The speaker feels a sense of peace at forty, but recalls a more powerful, more confident time in his life.
Weary
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
Here, in the silent churchyard, 'mid a thousand dead, alone,
Weary I sit for a moment clasping this cross of stone,
Southampton Water
© William Lisle Bowles
Smooth went our boat upon the summer seas,
Leaving, for so it seemed, the world behind,
The Tower of the Dream
© Charles Harpur
But not thus always are our dreams benign;
Oft are they miscreationsgloomier worlds,
Crowded tempestuously with wrongs and fears,
More ghastly than the actual ever knew,
And rent with racking noises, such as should
Go thundering only through the wastes of hell.
A Dilettante
© Augusta Davies Webster
Good friend, be patient: goes the world awry?
well, can you groove it straight with all your pains?
and, sigh or scold, and, argue or intreat,
what have you done but waste your part of life
on impotent fool's battles with the winds,
that will blow as they list in spite of you?
The Text
© Charles Lamb
One Sunday eve a grave old man,
Who had not been at church, did say,
"Eliza, tell me, if you can,
What text our Doctor took to-day?"
Englysh Metamorphosis
© Thomas Chatterton
BOOKE st.
WHANNE Scythyannes, salvage as the wolves theie chacde,
