Wish poems
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To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811
© William Wordsworth
FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
The Dream of a Lacquer Box
© Kimiko Hahn
I wish I knew the contents and I wish the contents
Japanese —
The Mariner's Cave
© Jean Ingelow
Once on a time there walked a mariner,
That had been shipwrecked;-on a lonely shore,
And the green water made a restless stir,
And a great flock of mews sped on before.
He had nor food nor shelter, for the tide
Rose on the one, and cliffs on the other side.
An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry
© William Taylor Collins
Home, thou return'st from Thames, whose Naiads long
Have seen thee ling'ring, with a fond delay,
Papyrus
© Eamon Grennan
Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples
draw the young men's rooster eyes
where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth,
breathing fire, holding for dear life.
Flash Jack from Gundagai
© Anonymous
I've shore at Burrabogie, and I've shore at Toganmain,
I've shore at big Willandra and upon the old Coleraine,
But before the shearin' was over I've wished myself back again
Shearin', for old Tom Patterson, on the One Tree Plain.
Love
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
To Joanna
© William Wordsworth
AMID the smoke of cities did you pass
The time of early youth; and there you learned,
A Moral Alphabet (excerpt)
© Hilaire Belloc
MORAL
If you were born to walk the ground,
Remain there; do not fool around.
Caliban upon Setebos
© Robert Browning
'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
The Princess (part 4)
© Alfred Tennyson
But when we planted level feet, and dipt
Beneath the satin dome and entered in,
There leaning deep in broidered down we sank
Our elbows: on a tripod in the midst
A fragrant flame rose, and before us glowed
Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold.
King Goodheart
© William Schwenck Gilbert
There lived a King, as I've been told
In the wonder-working days of old,
Returning of Issue
© Henry Reed
Tomorrow will be your last day here. Someone is speaking:
A familiar voice, speaking again at all of us.
And beyond the windows it is inside now, and autumn
On a wind growing daily harsher, small things to the earth
Are turning and whirling, small. Tomorrow will be
Your last day here,
Maud XVIII: I have led her Home, my love, my only friend
© Alfred Tennyson
I have led her home, my love, my only friend,
There is none like her, none.
And never yet so warmly ran my blood
And sweetly, on and on
Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.
from Omeros
© Derek Walcott
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
Sonnets from the Portuguese 28: My Letters!
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white ! —
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Hymn to the Comb-Over
© Wesley McNair
How the thickest of them erupt just
above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
