War poems
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The Loneliness of the Military Historian
© Margaret Atwood
But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
The True Born Englishman
© Daniel Defoe
Which medly cantond in a heptarchy,
A rhapsody of nations to supply,
Among themselves maintaind eternal wars,
And still the ladies lovd the conquerors.
The Lady’s Dressing Room
© Jonathan Swift
Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday
© Robert Hayden
Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,
His fancy warbler;
Satan sweet-talked her,
four bullets hushed her.
Who would have thought
she’d end that way?
[The Doleful Lay of Clorinda]
© Mary Sidney Herbert
Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain,
That may compassion my impatient grief?
“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.”
© Anthony Evan Hecht
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas (July, 1861)
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
All they feel is this: ’tis glory,
A rapture sharp, though transitory,
Yet lasting in belaureled story.
So they gayly go to fight,
Chatting left and laughing right.
The Disabled Debauchee
© John Wilmot
As some brave admiral, in former war
Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,
Two rival fleets appearing from afar,
Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill;
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
Paradise Lost: Book VII (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
DEscend from Heav'n Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine
"This living hand, now warm and capable"
© John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
© Larry Levis
I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover
From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now,
Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled,
Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out
Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A.
The Shortest Night
© Yusef Komunyakaa
I went into the forest searching
for fire inside pleading wood,
The Clearing
© Jane Kenyon
The dog and I push through the ring
of dripping junipers
to enter the open space high on the hill
where I let him off the leash.
The Caveman on the Train
© Daniel Nester
When first the apprizing eye and tongue that muttered
(Banished from Eden’s air? Or pride of apes?)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
Jerusalem
© Naomi Shihab Nye
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
—Tommy Olofsson, Sweden
I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
