Work poems
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Delia LIII
© Samuel Daniel
Unhappy pen and ill accepted papers,
That intimate in vain my chaste desires,
Neighbours
© Rudyard Kipling
The man that is open of heart to his neighbour,
And stops to consider his likes and dislikes,
Sonnet LVII. To Sleep.
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
COME, Sleep Oblivion's sire! Come, blessed Sleep!
Thy shadowy sheltering wings above me spread.
Fold to thy balmy breast my weary head.
Shut close behind the gates of sense, and steep
From Laughter To Labor
© Edgar Albert Guest
We have wandered afar in our hunting for pleasure,
We have scorned the soul's duty to gather up treasure;
We have lived for our laughter and toiled for our winning
And paid little heed to the soul's simple sinning.
But light were the burdens that freighted us then,
God and country, to-day let us prove we are men!
Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear."
A Derry on a Cove
© Henry Lawson
Why dont you go to work? he said (he muttered, Why dont you?).
Yer honer knows as well as me there aint no work to do.
And when I try to find a job Im shaddered by a trap
Its awful when the pleece has got a derry on a chap.
The Everlasting Monday
© Sylvia Plath
The moon's man stands in his shell,
Bent under a bundle
Of sticks. The light falls chalk and cold
Upon our bedspread.
His teeth are chattering among the leprous
Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
© Walt Whitman
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
"Still I have not died, and still am not alone"
© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
Still I have not died, and still am not alone,
while with my beggarwoman friend
I take my pleasure from the grandeur of the plain
and from its gloom, its hunger and its hurricanes.
The Lady Of La Garaye - Prologue
© Caroline Norton
This was the Chapel: that the stair:
Here, where all lies damp and bare,
The fragrant thurible was swung,
The silver lamp in beauty hung,
And in that mass of ivied shade
The pale nuns sang--the abbot prayed.
His Farewell to Sack
© Robert Herrick
Farewell thou thing, time past so known, so dear
To me as blood to life and spirit; near,
Hannah
© Thomas Parnell
Then Seek ye Subject & its song be mine
Whose numbers next in Sacred story shine;
Go brightly-working thought, prepard to fly
Above ye page on hov'ring pinnions ly,
& beat with stronger force to make thee rise
Where beautious Hannah meets ye searching eyes.
The Country Whore
© Cesare Pavese
It often returns, in the slow rise from sleep,
that undone aroma of far-off flowers,
of barns and of sun. No man can know
the subtle caress of that sour memory.
No man can see, beyond that sprawled body,
that childhood passed in such clumsy anxiety.
Coole Park 1929
© William Butler Yeats
I MEDITATE upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts
© William Wordsworth
. Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
America
© Phillis Wheatley
New England first a wilderness was found
Till for a continent 'twas destin'd round
The Bounty
© Derek Walcott
Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto
