Power poems
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The Double Fortress
© Alfred Noyes
Time, wouldst thou hurt us? Never shall we grow old.
Break as thou wilt these bodies of blind clay,
Thou canst not touch us here, in our stronghold,
Where two, made one, laugh all thy powers away.
Gravikty
© Harold Monro
I
Fit for perpetual worship is the power
That holds our bodies safely to the earth.
Nature, For Nature's Sake
© Jean Ingelow
White as white butterflies that each one dons
Her face their wide white wings to shade withal,
Many moon-daisies throng the water-spring.
While couched in rising barley titlarks call,
And bees alit upon their martagons
Do hang a-murmuring, a-murmuring.
The Monument Of Kindness
© Edgar Albert Guest
We do not build our monuments in stone,
The records of our life aren't cast in steel;
We are forgot, if when the spirit's flown
No human hearts our finger prints reveal.
Loraine
© George Essex Evans
In her dark-ringed eyes shone the sad unrest
That spoke in the heave of her troubled breast,
And her face was white as the chiselled stone,
And her lips pressed madly against my own,
And her heart beat wildly against my heart,
And we strove to go, but we could not part.
What I Learned From My Mother by Julia Kasdorf: American Life in Poetry #60 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet La
© Ted Kooser
Most of us have taken at least a moment or two to reflect upon what we have learned from our mothers. Through a catalog of meaningful actions that range from spiritual to domestic, Pennsylvanian Julia Kasdorf evokes the imprint of her mother's life on her own. As the poem closes, the speaker invites us to learn these actions of compassion.
Amais
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I
``O King Amasis, hail!
News from thy friend, the King Polycrates!
My oars have never rested on the seas
The Vow Of Washington
© John Greenleaf Whittier
The sword was sheathed: in April's sun
Lay green the fields by Freedom won;
And severed sections, weary of debates,
Joined hands at last and were United States.
While I Listen to Thy Voice
© Edmund Waller
While I listen to thy voice,
Chloris, I feel my life decay;
That powerful noise
Calls my flitting soul away.
Oh! suppress that magic sound,
Which destroys without a wound.
To The Lord Chancellor
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
Thy country's curse is on thee, darkest crest
Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm
Which rends our Mothers bosomPriestly Pest!
Masked Resurrection of a buried Form!
On Happiness
© James Thomson
Warm'd by the summer sun's meridian ray,
As underneath a spreading oak I lay
Contemplating the mighty load of woe,
In search of bliss that mortals undergo,
Of The Nature Of Things: Book IV - Part 05 - The Passion Of Love
© Lucretius
This craving 'tis that's Venus unto us:
From this, engender all the lures of love,
The Defeat of Youth
© Aldous Huxley
I. UNDER THE TREES.
There had been phantoms, pale-remembered shapes
The Braggart
© Rudyard Kipling
Petrolio, vaunting his Mercedes' power,
Vows she can cover eighty miles an hour.
I tried the car of old and know she can.
But dare he ever make her? Ask his man!
The Widow To Her Sons Betrothed
© Caroline Norton
I.
AH, cease to plead with that sweet cheerful voice,
Nor bid me struggle with a weight of woe,
Lest from the very tone that says "rejoice"
Funeral Tree of the Sokokis
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Around Sebago's lonely lake
There lingers not a breeze to break
The mirror which its waters make.
