Work poems
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A Tardy Apology
© Eugene Field
You ask me, friend,
Why I don't send
The long since due-and-paid-for numbers;
Why, songless, I
As drunken lie
Abandoned to Lethean slumbers.
On The Hurry Of This Time
© Henry Austin Dobson
With slower pen men used to write,
Of old, when "letters" were "polite";
In Anna's, or in George's days,
They could afford to turn a phrase,
Or trim a straggling theme aright.
HMS Pinafore: Act I
© William Schwenck Gilbert
SCENE - Quarter-deck of H.M.S. Pinafore. Sailors, led by
Boatswain, discovered cleaning brasswork, splicing rope, etc.
To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, with John Donne's Satires
© Benjamin Jonson
Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are
Life of the Muses' day, their morning star!
Within and Without: Part III: A Dramatic Poem
© George MacDonald
SCENE I.-Night. London. A large meanly furnished room; a single
candle on the table; a child asleep in a little crib. JULIAN
sits by the table, reading in a low voice out of a book. He looks
older, and his hair is lined with grey; his eyes look clearer.
A Flower. Painted By Simon Varelst
© Matthew Prior
When famed Varelst this little wonder drew,
Flora vouchsafed the growing works to view;
Finding the painter's science at a stand,
The goddess snatch'd the pencil from his hand,
And finishing the piece, she smiling said,
Behold one work of mine that ne'er shall fade.
Le Mauvais Moine (The Bad Monk)
© Charles Baudelaire
Les cloîtres anciens sur leurs grandes murailles
Etalaient en tableaux la sainte Vérité,
Dont l'effet réchauffant les pieuses entrailles,
Tempérait la froideur de leur austérité.
The Black Preacher: A Breton Legend
© James Russell Lowell
Something like this, then, my guide had to tell,
Perched on a saint cracked across when he fell;
But since I might chance give his meaning a wrench,
He talking his _patois_ and I English-French,
I'll put what he told me, preserving the tone,
In a rhymed prose that makes it half his, half my own.
A Mothers Song
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Over fast--closed baby eyes
In the garden's golden air
Blossom--white the butterflies
Hover, hurry, part and pair,
Sudden shinings, flown nowhere!
Blue, above, the unbounded skies!
Joe Golightly - Or, The First Lord's Daughter
© William Schwenck Gilbert
A tar, but poorly prized,
Long, shambling, and unsightly,
Thrashed, bullied, and despised,
Was wretched JOE GOLIGHTLY.
Andromeda
© Charles Kingsley
Over the sea, past Crete, on the Syrian shore to the southward,
Dwells in the well-tilled lowland a dark-haired AEthiop people,
The Big Deeds
© Edgar Albert Guest
We are done with little thinking and we're done with little deeds,
We are done with petty conduct and we're done with narrow creeds;
The Devil
© William Henry Drummond
Along de road from Bord à Plouffe
To Kaz-a-baz-u-a
W'ere poplar trees lak sojers stan',
An' all de lan' is pleasan' lan',
In off de road dere leev's a man
Call Louis Desjardins.
Gotham - Book III
© Charles Churchill
Can the fond mother from herself depart?
Can she forget the darling of her heart,
From Paris To Brussels (11 P.M. 15 October To Half-Past 1 P.M. 16) Proem At The Paris Station
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
In France (to baffle thieves and murderers)
A journey takes two days of passport work
The Day Before I Die
© Henry Lawson
THERES such a lot of work to do, for such a troubled head!
Im scribbling this against a book, with foolscap round, in bed.
It strikes me that Ill scribble much in this way by and by,
And write my last lines so perchance the day before I die.
Poets At Seven Years
© Arthur Rimbaud
And the mother, closing the work-book
Went off, proud, satisfied, not seeing,
In the blue eyes, under the lumpy brow,
The soul of her child given over to loathing.
The Swagman
© Anonymous
Kind friends, pray give attention
To this, my little song.
Some rum things I will mention,
