War poems
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Year That Trembled
© Walt Whitman
YEAR that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough-yet the air I breathed froze me;
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me;
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself;
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?
Paradise Lost: Book IV
© Patrick Kavanagh
"Which of those rebel Spirits adjudg'd to Hell
Com'st thou, escap'd thy prison? and, transform'd,
Why satt'st thou like an enemy in wait,
Here watching at the head of these that sleep?"
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 124
© Alfred Tennyson
That which we dare invoke to bless;
Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess;
The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary
© Heather McHugh
I emulated there, in that
Godawful place. What kind
of face
Ode XVIII: To The Right Honourable Francis Earl Of Huntington
© Mark Akenside
I. 2.
Nor less prevailing is their charm
The vengeful bosom to disarm;
To melt the proud with human woe,
And prompt unwilling tears to flow.
The Princess: Home they Brought her Warrior Dead
© Alfred Tennyson
Home they brought her warrior dead:
She nor swoon'd nor utter'd cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
"She must weep or she will die."
February
© Margaret Atwood
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
Marenghi
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
II.
A massy tower yet overhangs the town,
A scattered group of ruined dwellings now...
The Retreat From Moscow
© Victor Marie Hugo
It snowed. A defeat was our conquest red!
For once the eagle was hanging its head.
Sonnet (Written in a Volume of Shakespeare)
© Thomas Hood
How bravely Autumn paints upon the sky
The gorgeous fame of Summer which is fled!
Hues of all flow'rs, that in their ashes lie,
Trophied in that fair light whereon they fed,
Hymn to Life
© James Schuyler
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Not Forgotten
© Toi Derricotte
I love the way the black ants use their dead.
They carry them off like warriors on their steel
Barbara Allen
© Pierre Reverdy
In Scarlet town, where I was born,
There was a fair maid dwellin’,
Made every youth cry Well-a-way!
Her name was Barbara Allen.
A Psalm For New Years Eve
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
A FRIEND stands at the door;
In either tight-closed hand
Hiding rich gifts, three hundred and three score:
Waiting to strew them daily o'er the land
To One In A Silent Time
© Alice Meynell
Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine?
This winter of a silent poet's heart
Is suddenly sweet with thee, but what thou art,
Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine.
Phyllis
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Sunshine or shadow, or gold day or gray day,
Life must be lived as our destinies rule;
Leisure or labor or work day or play day
Feasts for the famous and fun for the fool;
Phyllis, ah, Phyllis, my life is a gray day.
Poems - Written On The Deaths Of Three Lovely Children
© Jean Ingelow
Yellow leaves, how fast they flutter-woodland hollows thickly strewing,
Where the wan October sunbeams scantly in the mid-day win,
While the dim gray clouds are drifting, and in saddened hues imbuing
All without and all within!
The Months
© Linda Pastan
Contorted by wind,
mere armatures for ice or snow,
the trees resolve
to endure for now,
Like Brothers We Meet
© George Moses Horton
Dedicated to the Federal and Late Confederate Soldiers
Like heart-loving brothers we meet,
