Power poems
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The New Year
© Emma Lazarus
Look where the mother of the months uplifts
In the green clearness of the unsunned West,
Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts,
Cool, harvest-feeding dews, fine-winnowed light;
Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest
Profusely to requite.
Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne
© Billy Collins
Every reader loves the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.
Magnets
© Robert Laurence Binyon
A far look in absorbed eyes, unaware
Of what some gazer thrills to gather there;
Paradise Lost: Book I (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despare:
And him thus answer'd soon his bold Compeer.
Under The Rose
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Oh the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.
A Prelude At Evening
© Robert Laurence Binyon
My spirit was like the lonely air
Before night,
Like hovering cloud that's melted there
In the late light,
Alfs Eleventh Bit
© Ezra Pound
My great press cleaves the guts of men,
My great noise drowns their cries,
My sales beat all the other ten,
Because I print most lies.
Naucratia; Or Naval Dominion. Part III.
© Henry James Pye
Arm'd in her cause, on Chalgrave's fatal plain,
Where sorrowing Freedom mourns her Hambden slain,
Say, shall the moralizing bard presume
From his proud hearse to tear one warlike plume,
Because a Cæsar or a Cromwell wore
An impious wreath, wet with their country's gore?
Tithonus
© Alfred Tennyson
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
The Pains of Sleep
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
Elegy XXIV. He Takes Occasion, From the Fate of Eleanor of Bretagne
© William Shenstone
When Beauty mourns, by Fate's injurious doom,
Hid from the cheerful glance of human eye,
When Nature's pride inglorious waits the tomb,
Hard is that heart which checks the rising sigh.
The Death Of Conradin
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
No cloud to dim the splendour of the day
Which breaks o'er Naples and her lovely bay,
And lights that brilliant sea and magic shore
With every tint that charmed the great of yore-
The imperial ones of earth, who proudly bade
Their marble domes e'en Ocean's realm invade.
Delia LIII
© Samuel Daniel
Unhappy pen and ill accepted papers,
That intimate in vain my chaste desires,
Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough
© Matthew Arnold
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear."
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 3. The Landlord's Tale; The Rhyme of Sir Christopher
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It was Sir Christopher Gardiner,
Knight of the Holy Sepulchre,
From Merry England over the sea,
Who stepped upon this continent
As if his august presence lent
A glory to the colony.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
© Walt Whitman
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Memories
© Rudyard Kipling
"The eradication of memories of the Great War. -SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT ORGAN
The Socialist Government speaks:
THOUGH all the Dead were all forgot
And razed were every tomb,
His Farewell to Sack
© Robert Herrick
Farewell thou thing, time past so known, so dear
To me as blood to life and spirit; near,
