Work poems
/ page 181 of 355 /
To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth
© Phillis Wheatley
Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The Purgatory Of St. Patrick - Act I
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
KING. Yes, from this rocky height,
Nigh to the sun, that with one starry light
Its rugged brow doth crown,
Headlong among the salt waves leaping down
Let him descend who so much pain perceives;
There let him raging die who raging lives.
Erskine
© John Le Gay Brereton
A singing voice is in my dream
The voice of Erskine, on his boulders,
Babbling and shouting till he shoulders
Stoutly against the heavier stream.
Reading the Bible Backwards
© Hugo Williams
All around the altar, huge lianas
curled, unfurled the dark green
from The Task, Book VI: The Winter Walk at Noon
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Thus heav’n-ward all things tend. For all were once
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
The Prime of Life
© Henry Lawson
OH, the strength of the toil of those twenty years, with father, and master, and men!
And the clearer brain of the business man, who has held his own for ten:
Oh, the glorious freedom from business fears, and the rest from domestic strife!
The past is dead, and the future assured, and Im in the prime of life!
The Sheep in the Ruins
© Archibald MacLeish
Works of soul—
Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder:
Through the mid night to the stroke of one!
Works of grace! Works of wonder!
All this have we done and more—
And seen—what have we not seen?—
Alton Locke's Song
© Charles Kingsley
Weep, weep, weep and weep,
For pauper, dolt, and slave!
Hark! from wasted moor and fen,
Feverous alley, stifling den,
Swells the wail of Saxon men-
Work! or the grave!
The Retinue
© Katharine Lee Bates
Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Austrian Heir-Apparent,
Rideth through the Shadow Land, not a lone knight errant,
But captain of a mighty train, millions upon millions,
Armies of the battle-slain, hordes of dim civilians;
Curriculum Vitae
© Samuel Menashe
Scribe out of work
At a loss for words
Not his to begin with,
The man life passed by
Stands at the window
Biding his time
Later On
© William Percy French
Later on, later on,
Oh what many friends have gone,
Sweet lips that smiled and loving eyes that shone
Through the darkness into light,
One by one they've winged their flight
And perhaps we'll play together -- later on.
The Ballad of the Black-Sheep
© Henry Lawson
A black-sheep, from England, who worked on the run
Riding where the stockmen ride
He sat by the hut when the days work was done
Lone huts where the black sheep bide.
Im tired of my life! to his lone self said he,
My girl and my country are both done with me!
Ferdiah; Or, The Fight At The Ford
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Time is it, O Cuchullin, to arise,
Time for the fearful combat to prepare;
For hither with the anger in his eyes,
To fight thee comes Ferdiah called the Fair.
Wasted
© Ada Cambridge
But, oh, how few the saved, how small the gain,
How poor the profit as against the cost,
The waste of life potential, vast and fair,
In soul unfructified and starveling brain,
Of Power that might have been, and might be-lost
For want of common food and common air!
Annie Protheroe. A Legend of Stratford-le-Bow
© William Schwenck Gilbert
OH! listen to the tale of little ANNIE PROTHEROE.
She kept a small post-office in the neighbourhood of BOW;
She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day -
A gentle executioner whose name was GILBERT CLAY.
Laval: Noble Educator
© John Daniel Logan
Lo, now a people learned in all the arts
Greet thee to-day across the distant vale
Of Truth, where dwells obscure the Holy Grail.
And tho they commerce oft upon the marts
Of specious gain, they look beyond the mist
To thee, their first great Educationist.
from Venus and Adonis
© William Shakespeare
Even as the sunne with purple-colourd face,
Had tane his last leaue of the weeping morne,
Rose-cheekt Adonis hied him to the chace,
Hunting he lou'd, but loue he laught to scorne,
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amaine vnto him,
And like a bold fac'd suter ginnes to woo him.
