War poems
/ page 396 of 504 /
The Mary Gloster
© Rudyard Kipling
I've paid for your sickest fancies; I've humoured your crackedest whim --
Dick, it's your daddy, dying; you've got to listen to him!
Good for a fortnight, am I? The doctor told you? He lied.
I shall go under by morning, and -- Put that nurse outside.
The Dead To The Living
© Edith Nesbit
Work while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
IN the childhood of April, while purple woods
The Cellar Door
© John Clare
By the old tavern door on the causey there lay
A hogshead of stingo just rolled from a dray,
Miles Keogh's Horse
© John Hay
On the bluff of the Little Big-Horn,
At the close of a woful day,
Custer and his Three Hundred
In death and silence lay.
The Port Phillip Patriot
© Anonymous
Oh, what a wretched, loathsome, thing am I,
Too horrible for earth, or the pure heaven,
The Long Trail
© Rudyard Kipling
The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And The Deuce knows we may do
But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
We're down, hull-down, on the Long Trail -- the trail that is always new!
In The Gray Of The Evening. Autumn.
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
WHEN o'er yon forest solitudes
The sky of autumn evening broods--
A heaven whose warp, but palely bright,
Shot through with woofs of crimson light,
Metamorphoses: Book The Fourth
© Ovid
The End of the Fourth Book.
Translated into English verse under the direction of
Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison,
William Congreve and other eminent hands
L'Envoi
© Rudyard Kipling
There's a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
And the ricks stand gray to the sun,
Singing: -- "Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
And your English summer's done."
The Last Rhyme of True Thomas
© Rudyard Kipling
The King has called for priest and cup,
The King has taken spur and blade
To dub True Thomas a belted knight,
And all for the sake o' the songs he made.
The Last Chantey
© Rudyard Kipling
"And there was no more sea."
Thus said The Lord in the Vault above the Cherubim
The Land
© Rudyard Kipling
When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
He called to him Hobdenius-a Briton of the Clay,
Saying: "What about that River-piece for layin'' in to hay?"
The Ladies
© Rudyard Kipling
I've taken my fun where I've found it;
I've rouged an' I've ranged in my time;
I've 'ad my pickin' o' seethearts,
An' four o' the lot was prime.
Songs of the Night Watches (complete)
© Jean Ingelow
Come out and hear the waters shoot, the owlet hoot, the owlet hoot;
Yon crescent moon, a golden boat, hangs dim behind the tree, O!
The dropping thorn makes white the grass, O sweetest lass, and sweetest
lass;
Come out and smell the ricks of hay adown the croft with me, O!”
Kim
© Rudyard Kipling
Unto whose use the pregnant suns are poised,
With idiot moons and stars retracting stars?
Creep thou between -- thy coming's all unnoised.
Heaven hath her high, as Earth her baser, wars.
The Bells Of San Blas
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What say the Bells of San Blas
To the ships that southward pass
From the harbor of Mazatlan?
To them it is nothing more
Than the sound of surf on the shore,--
Nothing more to master or man.
Jubal and Tubal Cain
© Rudyard Kipling
Canadian
Jubal sang of the Wrath of God
And the curse of thistle and thorn--
But Tubal got him a pointed rod,
Winter Poem
© Laurie Lee
Tonight the wind gnaws with teeth of glass
The jackdaw shivers in caged branches of iron
The Surrender
© Henry King
My once dear Love; hapless that I no more
Must call thee so: the rich affections store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like summes of treasure unto Bankrupts lent.
In the Neolithic Age
© Rudyard Kipling
I the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt.
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.
