Work poems
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Questions Of Life
© John Greenleaf Whittier
A bending staff I would not break,
A feeble faith I would not shake,
Nor even rashly pluck away
The error which some truth may stay,
Whose loss might leave the soul without
A shield against the shafts of doubt.
The Shipwreck Of Idomeneus
© George Meredith
Amid the din of elemental strife,
No voice may pierce but Deity supreme:
And Deity supreme alone can hear,
Above the hurricane's discordant shrieks,
The cry of agonized humanity.
The New Decalogue
© Ambrose Bierce
Have but one God: thy knees were sore
If bent in prayer to three or four.
Paradise Lost: Book XII (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
AS one who in his journey bates at Noone,
Though bent on speed, so heer the Archangel paus'd
Betwixt the world destroy'd and world restor'd,
If Adam aught perhaps might interpose;
Then with transition sweet new Speech resumes.
Things
© Louis Simpson
A man stood in the laurel tree
Adjusting his hands and feet to the boughs.
He said, “Today I was breaking stones
On a mountain road in Asia,
Eight Variations
© Weldon Kees
1.
Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns,
But that was quite some time ago.
Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs,
Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.
Maxime Labelle
© William Henry Drummond
Victoriaw: she have beeg war, E-gyp's de nam' de place--
An' neeger peep dat's leev 'im dere, got very black de face,
An' so she's write Joseph Mercier, he's stop on Trois Rivieres--
"Please come right off, an' bring wit' you t'ree honder voyageurs.
from The Testament of Love
© John Hall Wheelock
from Book I, Introduction
Man’s Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,
Singing School
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Ulster was British, but with no rights on
The English lyric: all around us, though
We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.
Guinevere
© Alfred Tennyson
`Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill!
Late, late, so late! but we can enter still.
Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now.
The Ecstasy
© Thomas Parnell
Charmd with the sight I long to bear my part
The pleasure flutters at my ravishd heart
Sweet saints and Angels Heavns immortall Quire
If Love have warmd me with celestial fire
Assist my words and as they move along
With Halelujah crown the burthend Song
Stump
© Donald Hall
Today they cut down the oak.
Strong men climbed with ropes
in the brittle tree.
The exhaust of a gasoline saw
was blue in the branches.
Written For My Son, And Spoken By Him, At A public Examination For Victors.
© Mary Barber
Boys of a brutal, cruel Disposition,
Should go to Spain, to serve the Inquisition.
O what a Change in Landlords would appear!
Next Age, not one would rack his Tenants here.
An Incident At Cambrai
© Robert Laurence Binyon
In a by--street, blocked with rubble
And any--way--tumbled stones,
Between the upstanding house--fronts'
Naked and scorched bones,
An Essay on Criticism: Part 2
© Alexander Pope
Thus critics, of less judgment than caprice,
Curious not knowing, not exact but nice,
Form short ideas; and offend in arts
(As most in manners) by a love to parts.
A Lay Of St. Gengulphus
© Richard Harris Barham
Gengulphus comes from the Holy Land,
With his scrip, and his bottle, and sandal shoon;
Full many a day has he been away,
Yet his Lady deems him return'd full soon.
Venus And Adonis
© William Shakespeare
TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLY,
EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON, AND BARON OF TICHFIELD.
RIGHT HONORABLE,
In Memoriam W.M & E.B.J.
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Mad are we all, maids, men, young fools alike and old,
All we that wander blind and want the with to dare.
Dark through the world we go, dazed sheep, across life's wold,
Edged from the flowers we loved by our herd's crook of care.
Hymn To Energy
© Arthur Symons
God is; and because life omnipotent
Gives birth to life, or of itself must die,
Nabokovs Blues
© William Matthews
The wallful of quoted passages from his work,
with the requisite specimens pinned next
to their literary cameo appearances, was too good
