Smile poems
/ page 214 of 369 /
Grandfather Bridgeman
© George Meredith
'Heigh, boys!' cried Grandfather Bridgeman, 'it's time before dinner to-day.'
He lifted the crumpled letter, and thumped a surprising 'Hurrah!'
Up jumped all the echoing young ones, but John, with the starch in his throat,
Said, 'Father, before we make noises, let's see the contents of the note.'
The old man glared at him harshly, and twinkling made answer: 'Too bad!
John Bridgeman, I'm always the whisky, and you are the water, my lad!'
Three Women
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
My love is young, so young;
Young is her cheek, and her throat,
And life is a song to be sung
With love the word for each note.
The Author
© Charles Churchill
Accursed the man, whom Fate ordains, in spite,
And cruel parents teach, to read and write!
Marys Wedding
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
The future I read in toil's guerdon,
You will read in your children's eyes:
The past--the same past with either--
Is to you a delightsome scene,
But I cannot trace it clearly
For the graves that rise between.
A Dream-Song
© George MacDonald
The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the day when the sleepers arise.
To... On the Death of Her Sister
© Samuel Rogers
Ah! little thought she, when, with wild delight
By many a torrent's shining track she flew,
When mountain-glens and caverns full of night
O'er her young mind divine enchantment threw,
A Glory Gone
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
What is my thought of you, beloved one,
Now you have passed from me and gone your ways?
Glory is gone with you from stars and sun,
And all wise meaning from the nights and days.
The Salutation
© Thomas Traherne
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,
Where have ye been? behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
Lines On The Death Of S. Oliver Torrey
© John Greenleaf Whittier
SECRETARY OF THE BOSTON YOUNG MEN'S ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.
Gone before us, O our brother,
La Belle Juive
© Henry Timrod
Is it because your sable hair
Is folded over brows that wear
At times a too imperial air;
A Lullaby
© Madison Julius Cawein
In her wimple of wind and her slippers of sleep
The twilight comes like a little goose-girl,
Herding her owls with many "tu-whoos,"
Her little brown owls in the woodland deep,
Where dimly she walks in her whispering shoes,
And gown of glimmering pearl.
The Bungalows
© John Ashbery
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
Lost In The Mist
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
THE thin white snow-streaks pencilling
That mountain's shoulder gray,
While in the west the pale green sky
Smiled back the dawning day,
Christabel
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
She stole along, she nothing spoke,
The sighs she heaved were soft and low,
And naught was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe:
She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
And in silence prayeth she.
Prisoners
© Denise Levertov
We taste other food that life,
like a charitable farm-girl,
holds out to us as we pass—
but our mouths are puckered,
a taint of ash on the tongue.
Small Woman on Swallow Street
© William Stanley Merwin
Four feet up, under the bruise-blue
Fingered hat-felt, the eyes begin. The sly brim
A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown
© Walt Whitman
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
We Wear the Mask
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
