Time poems
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Elegiac Stanzas On The Death Of Sir Peter Parker, Bart.
© George Gordon Byron
There is a tear for all that die,
A mourner o'er the humblest grave;
But nations swell the funeral cry,
And Triumph weeps above the brave.
Adam Weirauch
© Edgar Lee Masters
I was crushed between Altgeld and Armour.
I lost many friends, much time and money
Fighting for Altgeld whom Editor Whedon
Denounced as the candidate of gamblers and anarchists.
Enoch Dunlap
© Edgar Lee Masters
How many times, during the twenty years
I was your leader, friends of Spoon River,
Did you neglect the convention and caucus,
And leave the burden on my hands
Mrs. Benjamin Painter
© Edgar Lee Masters
I know that he told how I snared his soul
With a snare which bled him to death.
And all the men loved him,
And most of the women pitied him.
London Types: Beef-Eater
© William Ernest Henley
His beat lies knee-high through a dust of story-
A dust of terror and torture, grief and crime;
Caroline Branson
© Edgar Lee Masters
With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked,
As often before, the April fields till star-light
Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness
Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood,
Hare Drummer
© Edgar Lee Masters
Do the boys and girls still go to Siever's
For cider, after school, in late September?
Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
On Aaron Hatfield's farm when the frosts begin?
Evening Song
© Kenneth Fearing
Sleep, McKade.
Fold up the day. It was a bright scarf.
Put it away.
Take yourself to pieces like a house of cards.
The Building
© Philip Larkin
Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
Isaiah Beethoven
© Edgar Lee Masters
They told me I had three months to live,
So I crept to Bernadotte,
And sat by the mill for hours and hours
Where the gathered waters deeply moving
Rebecca Wasson
© Edgar Lee Masters
Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring,
After each other drifting, past my window drifting!
And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting
The years till a terror came in my heart at times,
Archibald Higbie
© Edgar Lee Masters
I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,
I was ashamed of you. I despised you
As the place of my nativity.
And there in Rome, among the artists,
Knowlt Hoheimer
© Edgar Lee Masters
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Jack McGuire
© Edgar Lee Masters
They would have lynched me
Had I not been secretly hurried away
To the jail at Peoria.
And yet I was going peacefully home,
The Shepheardes Calender: Januarie
© Edmund Spenser
A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)
when Winters wastful spight was almost spent,
All in a sunneshine day, as did befall,
Led forth his flock, that had been long ypent.
So faynt they woxe, and feeble in the folde,
That now vnnethes their feete could them vphold.
The Spooniad
© Edgar Lee Masters
[The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for the first time published in Reedy's Mirror of December 18th, 1914.]
Of John Cabanis' wrath and of the strife
Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
Who led the common people in the cause
William H. Herndon
© Edgar Lee Masters
There by the window in the old house
Perched on the bluff, overlooking miles of valley,
My days of labor closed, sitting out life's decline,
Day by day did I look in my memory,
Jonathan Swift Somers
© Edgar Lee Masters
After you have enriched your soul
To the highest point,
With books, thought, suffering, the understanding of many personalities,
The power to interpret glances, silences,
The Patient Countess. - extracted from Albion's England
© William Warner
Impatience chaungeth smoke to flame, but jealousie is hell;
Some wives by patience have reduc'd ill husbands to live well:
Kinsey Keene
© Edgar Lee Masters
Your attention, Thomas Rhodes, president of the bank;
Coolbaugh Wedon, editor of the Argus;
Rev. Peet, pastor of the leading church;
A.D. Blood, several times Mayor of Spoon River;
