Time poems
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New Year's Eve
© Mathilde Blind
Poor fool of life! plagued ever with thy vain
Regrets and futile longings! were the years
Not cups o'erbrimming still with gall and tears?
Let go thy puny personal joy and pain!
If youth with all its brief hope disappears,
To deathless hope we must be born again.
Safe by Steven Huff: American Life in Poetry #151 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Thirty, forty years ago, there were lots of hitchhikers, college students, bent old men and old women, and none of them seemed fearful of being out there on the highways at the mercy of strangers. All that's changed, and nobody wants to get in a car with a stranger. Here Steven Huff of New York tells us about a memorable ride.
Safe
"How funny it would be if dreamy I"
© Lesbia Harford
How funny it would be if dreamy I
Should leave one book behind me when I die
And that a book of Lawthis silly thing
Just written for the money it will bring.
I do hope, when it's finished, I'll have time
For other books and better spurts of rhyme.
Hermann And Dorothea - VIII. Melpomene
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But she conceal'd the pain which she felt, and jestingly spoke thus
"It betokens misfortune,--so scrupulous people inform us,--
For the foot to give way on entering a house, near the threshold.
I should have wish'd, in truth, for a sign of some happier omen!
Let us tarry a little, for fear your parents should blame you
For their limping servant, and you should be thought a bad landlord."
Modern Greece
© Richard Monckton Milnes
As, in the legend which our childhood loved,
The destined prince was guided to the bed,
Where, many a silent year, the charmèd Maid
Lay still, as though she were not; nor could wake,
Playing For Keeps
© Edgar Albert Guest
I've watched him change from his bibs and things, from bonnets known as "cute,"
To little frocks, and later on I saw him don a suit;
The Dead Coach
© Katharine Tynan
At night when sick folk wakeful lie,
I heard the dead coach passing by,
And heard it passing wild and fleet,
And knew my time was come not yet.
Lost Mr. Blake
© William Schwenck Gilbert
He was quite indifferent as to the particular kinds of dresses
That the clergyman wore at church where he used to go to pray,
And whatever he did in the way of relieving a chap's distresses,
He always did in a nasty, sneaking, underhanded, hole-and-corner
sort of way.
Virgils Gnat
© Edmund Spenser
And whatsoeuer other flowre of worth,
And whatso other hearb of louely hew
The iouyous Spring out of the ground brings forth,
To cloath her selfe in colours fresh and new;
He planted there, and reard a mount of earth,
In whose high front was writ as doth ensue.
How Lucy Backslid
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
De times is mighty stirrin' 'mong de people up ouah way,
Dey 'sputin' an' dey argyin' an' fussin' night an' day;
An' all dis monst'ous trouble dat hit meks me tiahed to tell
Is 'bout dat Lucy Jackson dat was sich a mighty belle.
John Bunny, Motion Picture Comedian
© Vachel Lindsay
Yorick is dead. Boy Hamlet walks forlorn
Beneath the battlements of Elsinore.
Where are those oddities and capers now
That used to set the table on a roar?
Tired
© Augusta Davies Webster
No not to-night, dear child; I cannot go;
I'm busy, tired; they knew I should not come;
you do not need me there. Dear, be content,
and take your pleasure; you shall tell me of it.
There, go to don your miracles of gauze,
and come and show yourself a great pink cloud.
The Coming Of Te Rauparaha.
© Arthur Henry Adams
BLUE, the wreaths of smoke, like drooping banners
From the flaming battlements of sunset
Hung suspended; and within his whare
Hipe, last of Ngatiraukawa's chieftains,
Verses Written At Bath, On Finding The Heel Of A Shoe
© William Cowper
Fortune! I thank thee: gentle goddess! thanks!
Not that my muse, though bashful, shall deny
The Borough. Letter XIX: The Parish-Clerk
© George Crabbe
WITH our late Vicar, and his age the same,
His clerk, hight Jachin, to his office came;
The like slow speech was his, the like tall slender
On Queen Anne's Peace, Anno 1713
© Thomas Parnell
Mother of plenty, daughter of the skies,
Sweet Peace, the troubl'd world's desire, arise;
Around thy poet weave thy summer shades,
Within my fancy spread thy flow'ry meads,
Amongst thy train soft ease and pleasure bring,
And thus indulgent sooth me whilst I sing.
Ode 1957: An intellectual
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Intellectuals try not to drown,
while the whole purpose of loves
is drowning.
An honest Valentine
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Returned from the Dead-Letter Office
THANK you for your kindness,
Lady fair and wise,
Though love's famed for blindness,
The Power of Science
© James Brunton Stephens
"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,"
