Truth poems
/ page 145 of 257 /
Seele im Raum
© Randall Jarrell
It is over.
It is over so long that I begin to think
That it did not exist, that I have never—
And my son says, one morning, from the paper:
“An eland. Look, an eland!”
—It was so.
The Tall Figures of Giacometti
© May Swenson
We move by means of our mud bumps.
We bubble as do the dead but more slowly.
The New Year
© Emma Lazarus
Look where the mother of the months uplifts
In the green clearness of the unsunned West,
Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts,
Cool, harvest-feeding dews, fine-winnowed light;
Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest
Profusely to requite.
Epilogue to Schiller's Song of the Bell
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mingled the crowds from ev'ry region brought,
And on the stage, in festal pomp array'd
The HOMAGE OF THE ARTS we saw displayed.
The Truth is Blind
© David Gascoyne
Autumnal breath of mornings far from here
A star veiled in grey mist
A living man:
Rural Rambles - The Village
© Ebenezer Elliott
Sweet village! where my early days were pass'd,
Though parted long, we meet, we meet at last!
Under The Rose
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Oh the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.
On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester
© Patrick Kavanagh
Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings
Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise,
Jim Crow Cars
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
If within the cruel Southland you have chanced to take a ride,
You the Jim Crow cars have noticed, how they crush a Negro's pride,
How he pays a first class passage and a second class receives,
Gets the worst accommodations ev'ry friend of truth believes.
Naucratia; Or Naval Dominion. Part III.
© Henry James Pye
Arm'd in her cause, on Chalgrave's fatal plain,
Where sorrowing Freedom mourns her Hambden slain,
Say, shall the moralizing bard presume
From his proud hearse to tear one warlike plume,
Because a Cæsar or a Cromwell wore
An impious wreath, wet with their country's gore?
Delia I
© Samuel Daniel
Unto the boundless Ocean of thy beauty
Runs this poor river, charged with streams of zeal:
Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough
© Matthew Arnold
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
After Looking into Carlyles Reminiscences
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
I.
THREE MEN lived yet when this dead man was young
An English Peasant
© George Crabbe
To pomp and pageantry in nought allied,
A noble peasant, Isaac Ashford, died.
from The Vanity of Human Wishes
© Henry James Pye
Yet still one genral cry the skies assails,
And gain and grandeur load the tainted gales,
Few know the toiling statesmans fear or care,
Th insidious rival and the gaping heir.
The Philosophic Pill
© William Schwenck Gilbert
I've wisdom from the East and from the West,
That's subject to no academic rule;
How Fair Cinderella Disposed Of Her Shoe
© Guy Wetmore Carryl
The Moral: All the girls on earth
Exaggerate their proper worth.
They think the very shoes they wear
Are worth the average millionaire;
Whereas few pairs in any town
Can be half-sold for half a crown!
The Death of Allegory
© Billy Collins
I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.
The Card-Dealer
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Could you not drink her gaze like wine?
Yet though its splendour swoon
