War poems
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Lucius Atherton
© Edgar Lee Masters
When my moustache curled,
And my hair was black,
And I wore tight trousers
And a diamond stud,
Paul McNeely
© Edgar Lee Masters
Dear Jane! dear winsome Jane!
How you stole in the room (where I lay so ill)
In your nurse's cap and linen cuffs,
And took my hand and said with a smile:
June
© John Payne
THE empress of the year, the meadows' queen,
Back from the East, with all her goodly train,
Evening Song
© Kenneth Fearing
Sleep, McKade.
Fold up the day. It was a bright scarf.
Put it away.
Take yourself to pieces like a house of cards.
The Building
© Philip Larkin
Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
Dunedin in the Gloaming
© Jessie Mackay
LIKE a black enamoured king whispered low the thunder
To the lights of Roslyn, terraced far asunder;
Ariel And Caliban
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
I.
Before PROSPERO'S cell. Moonlight.
ARIEL.
So Prospero is gone and I am free
To Sir Henry Wotton II
© John Donne
HERE'S no more news than virtue ; I may as well
Tell you Calais, or Saint Michael's tales, as tell
That vice doth here habitually dwell.
The Spooniad
© Edgar Lee Masters
[The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for the first time published in Reedy's Mirror of December 18th, 1914.]
Of John Cabanis' wrath and of the strife
Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
Who led the common people in the cause
The Emigrant Mother
© William Wordsworth
Once having seen her clasp with fond embrace
This Child, I chanted to myself a lay,
Endeavouring, in our English tongue, to trace
Such things as she unto the Babe might say:
And thus, from what I heard and knew, or guessed,
My song the workings of her heart expressed.
The Linnet's Nest
© Erasmus Darwin
The busy birds, with nice selection, cull
Soft thistle-down, gray moss, and scatter'd wool;
The Evening Company
© James Whitcomb Riley
Within the sitting-room, the company
Had been increased in number. Two or three
Young couples had been added: Emma King,
Ella and Mary Mathers--all could sing
Like veritable angels--Lydia Martin, too,
And Nelly Millikan.--What songs they knew!--
Lydia Puckett
© Edgar Lee Masters
Knowlt Hoheimer ran away to the war
The day before Curl Trenary
Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett
For stealing hogs.
O Glorious France
© Edgar Lee Masters
You have become a forge of snow-white fire,
A crucible of molten steel, O France!
Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn
And fade in light for you, O glorious France!
The House Of Dust: Part 01: 04:
© Conrad Aiken
Up high black walls, up sombre terraces,
Clinging like luminous birds to the sides of cliffs,
The yellow lights went climbing towards the sky.
From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain,
Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye.
That There Dog O' Mine
© Henry Lawson
Macquarie the shearer had met with an accident. To tell the truth, he had been in a drunken row at a wayside shanty, from which he had escaped with three fractured ribs, a cracked head, and various minor abrasions. His dog, Tally, had been a sober but savage participator in the drunken row, and had escaped with a broken leg.
Macquarie afterwards shouldered his swag and staggered and struggled along the track ten miles to the Union-Town Hospital. Lord knows how he did it. He didn't exactly know himself. Tally limped behind all the way on three legs. The doctors examined the man's injuries and were surprised at his endurance.
In State
© Forceythe Willson
I.
O Keeper of the Sacred Key,
And the Great Seal of Destiny,
Whose eye is the blue canopy,
Look down upon the warring world, and tell us what the end will be.
Father Prayer
© Margaret Widdemer
Lord God, Who let Your baby son
Pass earthward where the joys were few
