Work poems
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First Communions
© Arthur Rimbaud
Truly, theyre stupid, these village churches
Where fifteen ugly chicks soiling the pillars
Listen, trilling out their divine responses,
To a black freak whose boots stink of cellars:
But the sun wakes now, through the branches,
The irregular stained-glasss ancient colours.
The Author Upon Himself
© Jonathan Swift
By an old pursued,
A crazy prelate, and a royal prude;
By dull divines, who look with envious eyes
On ev'ry genius that attempts to rise;
Hesiod: Or, The Rise Of Woman
© Thomas Parnell
Gold-scepter'd Juno next exalts the Fair;
Her Touch endows her with imperious Air,
Self-valuing Fancy, highly-crested Pride,
Strong sov'reign Will, and some Desire to chide:
For which, an Eloquence, that aims to vex,
With native Tropes of Anger, arms the Sex.
Dow's Flat
© Francis Bret Harte
Dow's Flat. That's its name;
And I reckon that you
Are a stranger? The same?
Well, I thought it was true,--
For thar isn't a man on the river as can't spot the place at first
view.
The Botanic Garden (Part VI)
© Erasmus Darwin
"Born in yon blaze of orient sky,
"Sweet MAY! thy radiant form unfold;
"Unclose thy blue voluptuous eye,
"And wave thy shadowy locks of gold.
Bess
© William Stafford
Ours are the streets where Bess first met her
cancer. She went to work every day past the
The Ghetto
© Lola Ridge
Cool, inaccessible air
Is floating in velvety blackness shot with steel-blue lights,
But no breath stirs the heat
Leaning its ponderous bulk upon the Ghetto
And most on Hester street…
Harvest Hymn
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Now autumn strews on every plain,
His mellow fruits and fertile grain;
Answer to Prayer
© James Weldon Johnson
Der ain't no use in sayin' de Lawd won't answer prah;
If you knows how to ax Him, I knows He's bound to heah.
De trouble is, some people don't ax de proper way,
Den w'en dey git's no answer dey doubts de use to pray.
L'Homme Moyen Sensuel
© Ezra Pound
Yet Radway went. A circumspectious prig!
And then that woman like a guinea-pig
Accosted, that's the word, accosted him,
Thereon the amorous calor slightly frosted him.
(I burn, I freeze, I sweat, said the fair Greek,
I speak in contradictions, so to speak.)
Cyder: Book I
© John Arthur Phillips
What Soil the Apple loves, what Care is due
To Orchats, timeliest when to press the Fruits,
Thy Gift, Pomona, in Miltonian Verse
Adventrous I presume to sing; of Verse
Nor skill'd, nor studious: But my Native Soil
Invites me, and the Theme as yet unsung.
An Inventor
© Augusta Davies Webster
I thought this time 'twas done at last,
the workings perfected, the life in it;
and there's the flaw again, the petty flaw,
the fretting small impossibility
that has to be made possible.
Adam: A Sacred Drama. Act 2.
© William Cowper
How exquisitely sweet
This rich display of flowers,
This airy wild of fragrance,
So lovely to the eye,
And to the sense so sweet.
The Old Leaven
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Maurice:
No, Mark, I'm not so easily cross'd;
'Tis true that I've had a run
Of bad luck lately; indeed, I've lost;
Well! somebody else has won.
Two Voices
© Edith Nesbit
COUNTRY
'SWEET are the lanes and the hedges, the fields made red with the clover,
Table Talk
© William Cowper
A. You told me, I remember, glory, built
On selfish principles, is shame and guilt;
Hymn
© Sir Henry Newbolt
O Lord Almighty, Thou whose hands
Despair and victory give;
In whom, though tyrants tread their lands,
The souls of nations live;
Sonnet 36: The Children of the Night
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes
Are for Thoughts purest gold the jewel-stones;
But shapes and echoes that are never done
Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes
Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones
The crash of battles that are never won.
A Story Of Doom: Book III.
© Jean Ingelow
Above the head of great Methuselah
There lay two demons in the opened roof
Invisible, and gathered up his words;
For when the Elder prophesied, it came
About, that hidden things were shown to them,
And burdens that he spake against his time.
