Work poems
/ page 173 of 355 /
An Anatomy of the World
© John Donne
(excerpt)
AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD
Wherein,
by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress
from The Seasons: Spring
© James Thomson
As rising from the vegetable World
My Theme ascends, with equal Wing ascend,
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 118
© Alfred Tennyson
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
Ulysses
© Alfred Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Jewel Box
© Eamon Grennan
Your jewel box of white balsa strips
and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes
from The Seasons: Winter
© James Thomson
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
Wyatt Resteth Here
© Henry Howard
Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest;
Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain,
And virtue sank the deeper in his breast;
Such profit he of envy could obtain.
The Operation
© Anne Sexton
Clean of the body’s hair,
I lie smooth from breast to leg.
All that was special, all that was rare
is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
To Ben Jonson
© Thomas Carew
'Tis true, dear Ben, thy just chastising hand
Hath fix'd upon the sotted age a brand
Very Strong February
© Bernadette Mayer
A man and a woman pretend to be white ice
Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm
from Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax
© Andrew Marvell
Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect;
Blue Ridge
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
Up there on the mountain road, the fireworks
blistered and subsided, for once at eye level:
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
© Stevie Smith
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
The Redshifting Web
© Wole Soyinka
5 Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise,
the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles.
Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial
They Sit Together on the Porch
© Wendell Berry
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
