War poems
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A Far Cry From Africa
© Derek Walcott
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
The Only Daughter. Illustration of a Picture
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
They bid me strike the idle strings,
As if my summer days
Delicatessen
© Joyce Kilmer
Why is that wanton gossip Fame
So dumb about this man's affairs?
Why do we titter at his name
Who come to buy his curious wares?
Lines For A Prologue
© Archibald MacLeish
These alternate nights and days, these seasons
Somehow fail to convince me. It seems
I have the sense of infinity!
Little Ballads Of Timely Warning; II:
© Ellis Parker Butler
Little Ballads Of Timely Warning; II: On Malicious Cruelty To Harmless Creatures
The cruelty of P. L. Brown
(He had ten toes as good as mine)
Was known to every one in town,
And, if he never harmed a noun,
He loved to make verbs shriek and whine.
In Memory of Rupert Brooke
© Joyce Kilmer
In alien earth, across a troubled sea,
His body lies that was so fair and young.
His mouth is stopped, with half his songs unsung;
His arm is still, that struck to make men free.
Pre-Existence
© Frances Darwin Cornford
I laid me down upon the shore
And dreamed a little space;
I heard the great waves break and roar;
The sun was on my face.
Ode Written in Spring
© John Logan
No longer hoary winter reigns,
No longer binds the streams in chains,
Edom O' Gordon
© Andrew Lang
It fell about the Martinmas,
When the wind blew shrill and cauld,
Said Edom o' Gordon to his men,--
"We maun draw to a hald.
The Twelve-Forty-Five
© Joyce Kilmer
(For Edward J. Wheeler)Within the Jersey City shed
The engine coughs and shakes its head,
The smoke, a plume of red and white,
Waves madly in the face of night.
The Proud Poet
© Joyce Kilmer
(For Shaemas O Sheel)One winter night a Devil came and sat upon my bed,
His eyes were full of laughter for his heart was full of crime.
"Why don't you take up fancy work, or embroidery?" he said,
"For a needle is as manly a tool as a pen that makes a rhyme!"
The Robe of Christ
© Joyce Kilmer
(For Cecil Chesterton)At the foot of the Cross on Calvary
Three soldiers sat and diced,
And one of them was the Devil
And he won the Robe of Christ.
Old Poets
© Joyce Kilmer
(For Robert Cortez Holliday)If I should live in a forest
And sleep underneath a tree,
No grove of impudent saplings
Would make a home for me.
To A Distant Friend
© William Wordsworth
Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?
The Convalescent
© Robert Laurence Binyon
O strange, O sweetly warm
Falls the sunshine on my cheek.
I taste the cordial North;
In the pines I hear him speak.
Natalias Resurrection: Sonnet XXVI
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Yet so it was. Adrian had hardly set
His lips to those cold lips where death had been,
His eyes those clammy eyelids scarce had wet
With his warm tears and poured his soul between,
