Politics poems
/ page 8 of 11 /America Politica Historia, in Spontaneity
© Gregory Corso
O this political air so heavy with the bells
and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest
The Intellectual
© Ishmael Reed
What should the wars do with these jigging fools?
The man behind the book may not be man,
His own man or the book’s or yet the time’s,
But still be whole, deciding what he can
In praise of politics or German rimes;
The Ghost
© Richard Harris Barham
There stands a City,- neither large nor small,
Its air and situation sweet and pretty;
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Kosmos
© Walt Whitman
Who includes diversity and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth and the equilibrium also,
A Lay Of St. Gengulphus
© Richard Harris Barham
Gengulphus comes from the Holy Land,
With his scrip, and his bottle, and sandal shoon;
Full many a day has he been away,
Yet his Lady deems him return'd full soon.
Thoughts
© Walt Whitman
Of public opinion,
Of a calm and cool fiat sooner or later, (how impassive! how certain and final!)
Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen
© William Butler Yeats
MANY ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
Days of 1994: Alexandrians
© Marilyn Hacker
for Edmund White
Lunch: as we close the twentieth century,
death, like a hanger-on or a wanna-be
sits with us at the cluttered bistro
table, inflecting the conversation.
The Old Major Explains
© Francis Bret Harte
Well, you see, the fact is, Colonel, I don't know as I can come:
For the farm is not half planted, and there's work to do at home;
And my leg is getting troublesome,--it laid me up last fall,--
And the doctors, they have cut and hacked, and never found the ball.
Canopus
© Bert Leston Taylor
When quacks with pills political would dope us,
When politics absorbs the livelong day,
The World-Soul
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Still, still the secret presses,
The nearing clouds draw down,
The crimson morning flames into
The fopperies of the town.
Within, without, the idle earth
Stars weave eternal rings,
The Old Water Mill
© Madison Julius Cawein
Wild ridge on ridge the wooded hills arise,
Between whose breezy vistas gulfs of skies
A Letter
© John Greenleaf Whittier
'TIS over, Moses! All is lost!
I hear the bells a-ringing;
Of Pharaoh and his Red Sea host
I hear the Free-Wills singing.*
Oh, What A Bump!
© George Ade
" That was the tackiest time I've had
In twenty years or more.
The crowd was jay and the tea was bad
And the whole affair a bore!"
An Epistle To Fleetwood Shephard, Esq. Burleigh, May 14, 1689
© Matthew Prior
Sir,
As once a twelvemonth to the priest,
The Bride Of The Nile - Act II
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Belkís. I cannot do these sums
So long before the date. In the meanwhile talk to me.
I want to be amused. Life will go drearily
If we are to be like this. Let us play at something--chess,
Or draughts, or dominoes. Ask me a thing to guess--
An intellectual game.