Power poems
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England
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
While men pay reverence to mighty things,
They must revere thee, thou blue-cinctured isle
The Regiment of Princes
© Thomas Hoccleve
Musynge upon the restlees bysynesse
Which that this troubly world hath ay on honde,
The Cōuercyon of Swerers
© Stephen Hawes
The fruytfull sentence & the noble werkes
To our doctryne wryten in olde antyquyte
By many grete and ryght notable clerkes
Grounded on reason & hyghe auctoryte
Prologue To The Second Part Of Henry IV
© Henry James Pye
AS ALTERED FROM SHAKESPEAR, BY THE REV. DR. VALPY, AND PERFORMED BY THE YOUNG GENTLEMEN OF READING SCHOOL.
Rhymed Plea For Tolerance - Prefatory Dialogue
© John Kenyon
Ye, thus who write in spite of critic law,
How had their satire kept your freaks in awe!
And, to sole sway controlling her pretence,
Bound Fancy down to compromise with Sense!
The Old Liberators by Robert Hedin: American Life in Poetry #185 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
When I was a boy, there were still a few veterans of the Spanish American War, and more of The Great War, or World War I, and now all those have died and those who served in World War II are passing from us, too. Robert Hedin, a Minnesota poet, has written a fine poem about these people.
The Old Liberators
Thomas Joseph Byrnes
© George Essex Evans
Calm be his sleep who lived to dare.
Go, say a patriot slumbers there
Whose brows were never bent to wear
His loftiest fame,
Yet wrote on Queenslands page a rare
A fadeless name!
The Childless Woman
© Harriet Monroe
O Mother of that heap of clay, so passive on your breast,
Now do you stare at death, woman, who yesterday were blest?
Spring
© Boris Pasternak
This spring the world is new and different;
More lively is the sparrows' riot.
I do not even try expressing it,
How full my soul is and how quiet.
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 1. The Sicilian's Tale; King Robert of Sicily
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Days came and went; and now returned again
To Sicily the old Saturnian reign;
Under the Angel's governance benign
The happy island danced with corn and wine,
And deep within the mountain's burning breast
Enceladus, the giant, was at rest.
The Ring And The Book - Chapter X - The Pope
© Robert Browning
Then Stephen, Pope and seventh of the name,
Cried out, in synod as he sat in state,
While choler quivered on his brow and beard,
Come into court, Formosus, thou lost wretch,
That claimedst to be late the Pope as I!
Invocation
© Edith Nesbit
The Spirit of Darkness, the Prince of the Power of the Air,
The terror that walketh by night, and the horror by day,
The legions of Evil, alert and awake and aware,
Press round him each hour; and I pray here alone, far away.
The Knight-Errant
© Virna Sheard
Keen in his blood ran the old mad desire
To right the world's wrongs and champion truth;
Deep in his eyes shone a heaven-lit fire,
And royal and radiant day-dreams of youth!
Epipsychidion: Passages Of The Poem, Or Connected Therewith
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
To the oblivion whither I and thou,
All loving and all lovely, hasten now
With steps, ah, too unequal! may we meet
In one Elysium or one winding-sheet!
Lilies Without, Lilies Within
© George Wither
Can I think the Guide of Heaven
Hath so beautifully given
The Workhouse Clock
© Thomas Hood
Father, mother, and careful child,
Looking as if it had never smiled
The Sempstress, lean, and weary, and wan,
With only the ghosts of garments on
"The Undying One" - Canto I
© Caroline Norton
"My parch'd lips strove for utterance--but no,
I could but listen still, with speechless woe:
I stretch'd my quivering arms--'Away! away!'
She cried, 'and let me humbly kneel, and pray
For pardon; if, indeed, such pardon be
For having dared to love--a thing like thee!'
Horace, Epist. I, VII Imitation Of Horace To Lord Oxford
© Jonathan Swift
Harley, the nation's great support,
Returning home one day from court,
His mind with public cares possest,
All Europe's business in his breast,
