Work poems
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Only A Building
© Edgar Albert Guest
For it isn't the marble, nor is it the stone,
Nor is it the columns of steel,
By which is the worth of an edifice known,
But by something that's living and real.
O Moon
© Mathilde Blind
O moon, large golden summer moon,
Hanging between the linden trees,
Which in the intermittent breeze
Beat with the rhythmic pulse of June!
Shakuntala Act VII (Final Act)
© Kalidasa
ACT VII
King Dushyant with Matali in the chariot of Indra (king of gods in heaven and also god of thunder), supposed to be above the clouds.
King Dushyant: I am sensible, O Matali, that, for having executed the commission which Indra gave me, I deserved not such a profusion of honours.
Drifting Away: A Fragment
© Charles Kingsley
Eversley, 1867.They drift away. Ah, God! they drift for ever.
I watch the stream sweep onward to the sea,
Like some old battered buoy upon a roaring river,
Round whom the tide-waifs hang-then drift to sea.
Hymn of the City
© William Cullen Bryant
Not in the solitude
Alone may man commune with heaven, or see
Only in savage wood
And sunny vale, the present Deity;
Or only hear his voice
Where the winds whisper and the waves rejoice.
Ode:Inscribed to W.H. Channing
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though loath to grieve
The evil time's sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My honeyed thought
For the priest's cant,
Or statesman's rant.
The Lovers
© Conrad Aiken
In this glass palace are flowers in golden baskets.
In that grim brownstone castle are silver caskets.
The caskets watch and wait, and the baskets wait,
for a certain day and hour, and a certain date.
De Stove Pipe Hole
© William Henry Drummond
Dat's very cole an' stormy night on Village St. Mathieu,
W'en ev'ry wan he's go couché, an' dog was quiet, too--
Young Dominique is start heem out see Emmeline Gourdon,
Was leevin' on her fader's place, Maxime de Forgeron.
Jim
© James Whitcomb Riley
He was jes a plain ever'-day, all-round kind of a jour.,
Consumpted-Iookin'-- but la!
The host, he says that all is well
© 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.
Grandmother's Story Of Bunker Hill Battle (as she saw it from the Belfry)
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
'Tis like stirring living embers when, at eighty, one remembers
All the achings and the quakings of "the times that tried men's souls";
When I talk of Whig and Tory, when I tell the Rebel story,
To you the words are ashes, but to me they're burning coals.
An Epistle To A Friend
© Samuel Rogers
When, with a Reaumur's skill, thy curious mind
Has class'd the insect-tribes of human-kind,
Each with its busy hum, or gilded wing,
Its subtle, web-work, or its venom'd sting;
The Maid-Martyr
© Jean Ingelow
Her face, O! it was wonderful to me,
There was not in it what I look'd for-no,
I never saw a maid go to her death,
How should I dream that face and the dumb soul?
Book Fourteenth [conclusion]
© William Wordsworth
In one of those excursions (may they ne'er
Fade from remembrance!) through the Northern tracts
