Work poems
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Astrophel and Stella
© Sir Philip Sidney
Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes entendeth,
Which now my breast, surcharg'd, to musick lendeth!
To you, to you, all song of praise is due,
Only in you my song begins and endeth.
The Recollection
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
NOW the last day of many days,
All beautiful and bright as thou,
Ozymandias of Egypt
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Sonnet 55
© William Shakespeare
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
The Working Party
© Siegfried Sassoon
Three hours ago, he stumbled up the trench;
Now he will never walk that road again:
He must be carried back, a jolting lump
Beyond all needs of tenderness and care.
Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff
© Adrienne Rich
The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
Integrity
© Adrienne Rich
the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety
~ Webster
A wild patience has taken me this far
Lion and Honeycomb
© Howard Nemerov
He asked himself, poor moron, because he had
Nobody else to ask. The others went right on
Talking about form, talking about myth
And the (so help us) need for a modern idiom;
The verseballs among them kept counting syllables.
State's Attorney Fallas
© Edgar Lee Masters
I, the scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker,
Smiter with whips and swords;
Davis Matlock
© Edgar Lee Masters
Suppose it is nothing but the hive:
That there are drones and workers
Colloquy in Black Rock
© Robert Lowell
Here the jack-hammer jabs into the ocean;
My heart, you race and stagger and demand
More blood-gangs for your nigger-brass percussions,
Till I, the stunned machine of your devotion,
Clanging upon this cymbal of a hand,
Am rattled screw and footloose. All discussions
Paul Revere's Ride
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
F?sulan Idyl
© Walter Savage Landor
She drew back
The boon she tendered, and then, finding not
The ribbon at her waist to fix it in,
Dropt it, as loth to drop it, on the rest.
There is no Fatwa in this Land
© Taja Kramberger
There is no fatwa in this land –
it is divided into
thousands of small conspiracies,
tiny murders per partes,
which seem like coincidental misfortunes
and sap your blood, drop by drop.
His Prayer For Absolution
© Robert Herrick
For those my unbaptized rhymes,
Writ in my wild unhallowed times,
Barmaid
© William Ernest Henley
Though, if you ask her name, she says Elise,
Being plain Elizabeth, e'en let it pass,
The Harvest Bow
© Seamus Justin Heaney
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
