Pet poems
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Easter Even
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
There is nothing more that they can do
For all their rage and boast;
Caiaphas with his blaspheming crew,
Herod with his host,
Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun
© Emily Jane Brontë
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun
Restored my earth to joy
Have you departed, every one,
And left a desert sky?
Moonrise
© Sylvia Plath
Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves.
I'll go out and sit in white like they do,
Doing nothing. July's juice rounds their nubs.
Tom Deadlight (1810)
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnought, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'-wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought.
Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For Ive received orders for to sail for the Deadman,
But hope with the grand fleet to see you again.
All The Talents
© George Canning
When the broad-bottom'd Junto, with reason at strife,
Resign'd, with a sigh, its political life;
When converted to Rome, and of honesty tired,
They gave back to the Devil the soul he inspired.
Annie Protheroe. A Legend of Stratford-le-Bow
© William Schwenck Gilbert
OH! listen to the tale of little ANNIE PROTHEROE.
She kept a small post-office in the neighbourhood of BOW;
She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day -
A gentle executioner whose name was GILBERT CLAY.
from Venus and Adonis
© William Shakespeare
Even as the sunne with purple-colourd face,
Had tane his last leaue of the weeping morne,
Rose-cheekt Adonis hied him to the chace,
Hunting he lou'd, but loue he laught to scorne,
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amaine vnto him,
And like a bold fac'd suter ginnes to woo him.
The Father of My Country
© Diane Wakoski
All fathers in Western civilization must have
a military origin. The
Scorn Not The Sonnet
© William Wordsworth
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
Desertion
© Rupert Brooke
So light we were, so right we were, so fair faith shone,
And the way was laid so certainly, that, when I'd gone,
Inside My Head
© Robert Creeley
Inside my head a common room,
a common place, a common tune,
a common wealth, a common doom
March: An Ode
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
I
Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight,
A Villequier
© Victor Marie Hugo
Maintenant que Paris, ses pavés et ses marbres,
Et sa brume et ses toits sont bien loin de mes yeux ;
Maintenant que je suis sous les branches des arbres,
Et que je puis songer à la beauté des cieux ;
The Crystal Lithium
© James Schuyler
The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach
Eve-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
© Oscar Wilde
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby gray;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
Upon my dear and loving husband his goeing into England, Jan. 16, 1661.
© Anne Bradstreet
O thov most high who rulest All,
And hear'st the Prayers of Thine;
