Strength poems
/ page 149 of 186 /
An Argument
© Vachel Lindsay
I. THE VOICE OF THE MAN IMPATIENT WITH VISIONS AND UTOPIASWe find your soft Utopias as white
As new-cut bread, and dull as life in cells,
O, scribes who dare forget how wild we are
How human breasts adore alarum bells.
Tears
© Robert Fuller Murray
Mourn that which will not come again,
The joy, the strength of early years.
Bow down thy head, and let thy tears
Water the grave where hope lies slain.
The Strength of the Lonely
© Vachel Lindsay
The moon's a monk, unmated,
Who walks his cell, the sky.
His strength is that of heaven-vowed men
Who all life's flames defy.
How a Little Girl Danced
© Vachel Lindsay
Oh, thrice-painted dancer, vaudeville dancer,
Sad in your spangles, with soul all astrain,
I know a dancer, I know a dancer,
Whose laughter and weeping are spiritual gain,
A pure-hearted, high-hearted maiden evangel,
With strength the dark cynical earth to disdain.
The Ideal
© Charles Harpur
Spirit of Dreams! When many a toilsome height
Shut paradise from exiled Adams sight,
The Passions. An Ode to Music
© William Taylor Collins
First Fear his hand, its skill to try,
Amid the chords bewilder'd laid,
And back recoil'd, he knew not why,
Ev'n at the sound himself had made.
With Scindia to Delphi
© Rudyard Kipling
More than a hundred years ago, in a great battle fought near Delhi,
an Indian Prince rode fifty miles after the day was lost
with a beggar-girl, who had loved him and followed him in all his camps,
on his saddle-bow. He lost the girl when almost within sight of safety.
The Swifts (1)
© Boris Pasternak
The swifts have no strength any more to retain,
To check the light-blue evening coolness.
It burst from their breasts, from their throats, under strain
And flows out of hand in its fullness.
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._
When the Great Ark
© Rudyard Kipling
When the Great Ark, in Vigo Bay,
Rode stately through the half-manned fleet,
From every ship about her way
She heard the mariners entreat--
Before we take the seas again
Let down your boats and send us men!
The Truce of the Bear
© Rudyard Kipling
Yearly, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in --
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.
Autograph Verses
© Joseph Furphy
"Prove what Life can give of gladness;
Seek for aught that merits trust
Sir Richard's Song
© Rudyard Kipling
(A. D. 1066)
I followed my Duke ere I was a lover,
To take from England fief and fee;
But now this game is the other way over--
But now England hath taken me!
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.
Aubade
© Philip Larkin
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
To James Freeman Clarke
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
I BRING the simplest pledge of love,
Friend of my earlier days;
Mine is the hand without the glove,
The heart-beat, not the phrase.
Outsong in the Jungle
© Rudyard Kipling
For the sake of him who showed
One wise Frog the Jungle-Road,
Keep the Law the Man-Pack make
For thy blind old Baloo's sake!
The Vision Of The Maid Of Orleans - The First Book
© Robert Southey
The plumeless bat with short shrill note flits by,
And the night-raven's scream came fitfully,
Borne on the hollow blast. Eager the Maid
Look'd to the shore, and now upon the bank
Leaps, joyful to escape, yet trembling still
In recollection.
The Hymn Of Man
© Khalil Gibran
I was,
And I am.
So shall I be to the end of time,
For I am without end.
