Smile poems
/ page 291 of 369 /
To J.R.
© Robert Fuller Murray
Last Sunday night I read the saddening story
Of the unanswered love of fair Elaine,
The `faith unfaithful' and the joyless glory
Of Lancelot, `groaning in remorseful pain.'
Death and Birth
© George MacDonald
Welcome, friend! Bring in your bricks.
Mortar there? No need to mix?
That is well. And picks and hammers?
Verily these are no shammers!-
There, my friend, build up that niche,
That one with the painting rich!
Daimon
© Aline Murray Kilmer
I SAW her after many years.
The blue-black hair that had swept to her knees
Was dull and grey. No one would turn
To look at her thin face worn with tears.
I felt my own wet eyelids burn,
For she had been queen of my memories.
A Sense of Humor
© Vachel Lindsay
NO man should stand before the moon
To make sweet song thereon,
With dandified importance,
His sense of humor gone.
Zion
© Rudyard Kipling
The Doorkeepers of Zion,
They do not always stand
In helmet and whole armour,
With halberds in their hand;
An Exotic
© Henry Timrod
Not in a climate near the sun
Did the cloud with its trailing fringes float,
Whence, white as the down of an angel's plume,
Fell the snow of her brow and throat.
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
The Widower
© Rudyard Kipling
For a season there must be pain--
For a little, little space
I shall lose the sight of her face,
Take back the old life again
While She is at rest in her place.
Two Kopjes
© Rudyard Kipling
Then mock not the African kopje,
And rub not your flank on its side,
The silent and simmering kopje,
The kopje beloved by the guide.
You can never be, etc.
Rubaiyat 04
© Shams al-Din Hafiz
One, beautiful and full of grace
Mirror in hand, grooming her face
My handkerchief I offered, she smiled,
Is this gift also part of the chase?
A Tale of Two Cities
© Rudyard Kipling
Where the sober-colored cultivator smiles
On his byles;
Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow
Come and go;
Study of an Elevation, In Indian Ink
© Rudyard Kipling
Potiphar Gubbins, C.E.
Stands at the top of the tree;
And I muse in my bed on the reasons that led
To the hoisting of Potiphar G.
The Domestic Affections
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Favor'd of Heav'n! O Genius! are they thine,
When round thy brow the wreaths of glory shine;
While rapture gazes on thy radiant way,
'Midst the bright realms of clear and mental day?
The Sons of Martha
© Rudyard Kipling
The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.
Ode in Honour
© Francis Scarfe
Evening is part of the jig-saw truth of her,
ply-wood ply-flesh, her insolent reply
blinding the ace with a straight shot to centre,
the woman's a delicate devil in twenty places
blander and blonder, tinder tenderly
setting the smiles on fire in men's faces.
The Song of the Cities
© Rudyard Kipling
BOMBAY
Royal and Dower-royal, I the Queen
Fronting thy richest sea with richer hands --
An Ode In Time Of Inauguration
© Franklin Pierce Adams
G.W., initial prex,
Right down in Wall Street, New York City,
Took his first oath. Oh, multiplex
The whimsies quaint, the comments witty
One might evolve from that! I scorn
To mock the spot where he was sworn.
The Sergeant's Weddin'
© Rudyard Kipling
'E was warned agin' 'er --
That's what made 'im look;
She was warned agin' 'im --
That is why she took.
Bond Street
© Arthur Henry Adams
Its glittering emptiness it brings -
This little lane of useless things.
Here peering envy arm in arm
With ennui takes her saunterings.
