Work poems
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The Right Family
© Edgar Albert Guest
With time our notions allus change,
An' years make old idees seem strange--
The Applicant
© Sylvia Plath
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
The Men Of Old
© John Greenleaf Whittier
WELL speed thy mission, bold Iconoclast!
Yet all unworthy of its trust thou art,
If, with dry eye, and cold, unloving heart,
Thou tread'st the solemn Pantheon of the Past,
Cutting Hair by Minnie Bruce Pratt: American Life in Poetry #190 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
Occupational hazards, well, you have to find yourself in the occupation to know about those. Here Minnie Bruce Pratt of Alabama gives us an inside look at a kind of work we all have benefited from but may never have thought much about.
Cutting Hair
On The Plaza
© Bliss William Carman
One August day I sat beside
A café window open wide
To let the shower-fresh ened air
Blow in across the Plaza, where
The Hotel
© Harriet Monroe
The long resounding marble corridors, the
shining parlors with shining women in
Psalm V.
© John Milton
Jehovah to my words give ear
My meditation waigh
The voyce of my complaining hear
My King and God for unto thee I pray.
Sun of My Soul
© John Keble
Sun of my soul, Thou Savior dear,
It is not night if Thou be near;
O may no earthborn cloud arise
To hide Thee from Thy servants eyes.
To Mr. John Rouse, Librarian of the University of Oxford. (Translated From Milton)
© William Cowper
Strophe I
My two-fold Book! single in show
The Kick Under The Table
© Edgar Albert Guest
After a man has been married awhile,
And his wife has grown used to his manner
In The Dials
© William Ernest Henley
To GARRYOWEN upon an organ ground
Two girls are jigging. Riotously they trip,
The Bagman's Dog: Mr. Peters's Story
© Richard Harris Barham
It was a litter, a litter of five,
Four are drown'd and one left alive,
He was thought worthy alone to survive;
And the Bagman resolved upon bringing him up,
To eat of his bread, and to drink of his cup,
He was such a dear little cock-tail'd pup.
Madeleine Vercheres
© William Henry Drummond
I've told you many a tale, my child, of the
old heroic days
The Nap Taker
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
No - I did not take a nap -
The nap - took - me
off the bed and out the window
far beyond the sea,
Phi Beta Kappa Poem
© Bliss William Carman
Harvard, 1914
SIR, friends, and scholars, we are here to serve
A high occasion. Our New England wears
All her unrivalled beauty as of old;
Memorabilia
© Edgar Lee Masters
Old pioneers, how fare your souls to-day?
They seem to be
Imminent about this pastoral way,
This sunny lea,
In The Manner Of Spenser
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O peace, that on a lilied bank dost love
To rest thine head beneath an olive tree,
I would that from the pinions of thy dove
One quill withouten pain yplucked might be!
The Two Thieves; Or, The Last Stage Of Avarice
© William Wordsworth
O NOW that the genius of Bewick were mine,
And the skill which he learned on the banks of the Tyne.
Then the Muses might deal with me just as they chose,
For I'd take my last leave both of verse and of prose.
Anhelli - Chapter 5
© Juliusz Slowacki
And so the Shaman and Anhelli made their pilgrimage through the sorrowful country
and over the desolate roads and under the roaring forests of Siberia,
meeting men who suffered, and comforting them.
Hermann And Dorothea - VII. Erato
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Joyfully heard the youth the willing maiden's decision,
Doubting whether he now had not better tell her the whole truth;
But it appear'd to him best to let her remain in her error,
First to take her home, and then for her love to entreat her.
Ah! but now he espied a golden ring on her finger,
And so let her speak, while he attentively listen'd:--
