Poetry poems
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Negation
© Clarke George Elliott
Le nègre negated, meagre, c'est moi:Denigrated, negative, a localCaliban, unlikable and disliked(Slick black bastard -
Naima
© Clarke George Elliott
Naima, I should perfume my letters,confuse spices with my ink,spirit tea from orange peels and sugar....
An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne
© Thomas Carew
Can we not force from widow'd poetry,Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegyTo crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust,Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust,Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flowerOf fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour,Dry as the sand that measures it, should layUpon thy ashes, on the funeral day?Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispenseThrough all our language, both the words and sense?'Tis a sad truth
Who Killed John Keats?
© George Gordon Byron
Are you aware that Shelley has written an elegy on Keats--and accuses the Quarterly of killing him?--
The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne
© Gelett Burgess
WAKE! For the Hack can scatter into flightShakespere and Dante in a single Night! The Penny-a-liner is Abroad, and strikesOur Modern Literature with blithering Blight.
To his Friend Master R. L., In Praise of Music and Poetry
© Richard Barnfield
If music and sweet poetry agree,As they must needs (the sister and the brother),Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me, Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other
To Mrs. P********, with some Drawings of Birds and Insects
© Anna Lætitia Barbauld
The kindred arts to please thee shall conspire,One dip the pencil, and one string the lyre. (Pope)
An Account of the Greatest English Poets (complete)
© Joseph Addison
Since, dearest Harry, you will needs requestA short account of all the muse possess'd;That, down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times,Have spent their noble rage in British rhymes;Without more preface, wrote in formal length,To speak the undertaker's want of strength,I'll try to make their sev'ral beauties known,And show their verses' worth, though not my own
Walking with Mandelstam
© Aaron Rafi
Once I thought that if I walked with you to the endof Russian literature, bumped into Yesenin and hissoft words, mingled with the throng that formedaround Pushkin or waited patiently at the SenateSquare while you threw pieces of Blok, Akhmatovaand poor old Mayakovsky to eager readers whopecked at your references, I would come tounderstand all that you represent
Her Portrait
© Francis Thompson
Oh, but the heavenly grammar did I hold
Of that high speech which angels' tongues turn gold!
At a Certain Age by Deborah Cummins: American Life in Poetry #138 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 200
© Ted Kooser
You've surely heard it said that the old ought to move over to make room for the young. But in the best of all possible worlds, people who love their work should be able to do it as long as they wish. Those forced to retire, well, they're a sorry lot. Here the Chicago poet, Deborah Cummins, shows a man trying to adjust to life after work.
At a Certain Age
The Pastime of Pleasure: Of dysposycyon the II. parte of rethoryke - (til line 1456)
© Stephen Hawes
The seconde parte of crafty rethoryke
Maye well be called dysposycyon
822 That doth so hyghe mater aromatytyke
823 Adowne dystyll / by consolacyon
All Ashore!
© Henry Lawson
The rattling donkey ceases,
The bell says we must part,
You long slab of good-nature,
And poetry and art!
Dead Butterfly by Ellen Bass: American Life in Poetry #164 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had livedâso brieflyâin its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?
Home Fire by Linda Parsons Marion: American Life in Poetry #92 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2
© Ted Kooser
Home is where the heart. . . Well, surely we all know that old saying. But it's the particulars of a home that make it ours. Here the poet Linda Parsons Marion, who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, celebrates familiarity, in its detail and its richness.
Poetry
© Charles Harpur
RISING and setting suns of Liberty
Mountainous exploits and the wrecks thick strewn
Train Journey
© Judith Wright
Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the train
