Work poems
/ page 198 of 355 /
Hotel Lautréamont
© John Ashbery
1.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society
working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.
We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”
Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
The Child Of The Islands - Autumn
© Caroline Norton
I.
BROWN Autumn cometh, with her liberal hand
Binding the Harvest in a thousand sheaves:
A yellow glory brightens o'er the land,
The Newspaper Man
© Edgar Albert Guest
Bit of a priest and a bit of sailor,
Bit of a doctor and bit of a tailor,
Windchime
© Tony Hoagland
She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,
Italy : 10. Como
© Samuel Rogers
I love to sail along the Larian Lake
Under the shore -- though not to visit Pliny,
To catch him musing in his plane-tree walk,
Or fishing, as he might be, from his window:
Imitations of Horace
© Alexander Pope
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
Lying
© Lola Ridge
To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Sonnet to Vauxhall
© Thomas Hood
The English Garden.Mason
The cold transparent ham is on my fork
The Hackney Coachman: Or the Way to Get a Good Fare
© Erica Jong
I am a bold Coachman, and drive a good hack,
With a coat of five capes that quite covers my back;
And my wife keeps a sausage-shop, not many miles
From the narrowest alley in all Broad St Giles.
The Deer and the Snake
© Kenneth Patchen
The deer is humble, lovely as God made her
I watch her eyes and think of wonder owned
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
Locksley Hall
© Alfred Tennyson
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.
Mabel Martin
© John Greenleaf Whittier
PROEM.
I CALL the old time back: I bring my lay
in tender memory of the summer day
When, where our native river lapsed away,
Jock O The Side
© Andrew Lang
Now Liddisdale has ridden a raid,
But I wat they had better staid at hame;
For Mitchell o Winfield he is dead,
And my son Johnie is prisner tane?
With my fa ding diddle, la la dew diddle.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
© Walt Whitman
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
On the Great Atlantic Rainway
© Kenneth Koch
I set forth one misted white day of June
Beneath the great Atlantic rainway, and heard:
Bears at Raspberry Time
© Hayden Carruth
Fear. Three bears
are not fear, mother
and cubs come berrying
in our neighborhood
February
© Ethelwyn Wetherald
O Master-Builder, blustering as you go
About your giant work, transforming all
