Work poems
/ page 242 of 355 /
The Wanderer
© John Masefield
ALL day they loitered by the resting ships,
Telling their beauties over, taking stock;
At night the verdict left my messmate's lips,
"The Wanderer is the finest ship in dock."
The Everlasting Mercy
© John Masefield
Thy place is biggyd above the sterrys cleer,
Noon erthely paleys wrouhte in so statly wyse,
Com on my freend, my brothir moost enteer,
For the I offryd my blood in sacrifise.
John Lydgate.
A Ballad of John Silver
© John Masefield
We were schooner-rigged and rakish,
with a long and lissome hull,
And we flew the pretty colours of the crossbones and the skull;
We'd a big black Jolly Roger flapping grimly at the fore,
And we sailed the Spanish Water in the happy days of yore.
A Footnote to a Famous Lyric
© Louise Imogen Guiney
TRUE loves own talisman, which here
Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
A steel-and-velvet Cavalier
Gave to our Saxon speech:
Opifex
© Edward Thomas
As I was carving images from clouds,
And tinting them with soft ethereal dyes
Pressed from the pulp of dreams, one comes, and cries:--
"Forbear!" and all my heaven with gloom enshrouds.
Captain Who Voyages No More
© Vlanes (Vladislav Nekliaev)
Troubled slumbering of things, the curtain blown aside
by the gush of the salty wind, the advent of the tide
mixing grains of dry sand, the disjoined palimpsest,
the thin wing beating under the chest, restlessly,
the splinters of far-off vessels stuck in the sea,
not entering the harbour, as if they have something to hide.
Run And Won
© Vlanes (Vladislav Nekliaev)
When you entered the workshop, I was already here.
How many statues, and torsos, and heads !
Like remains of the battle that never ends.
I am giggling into my beard. Wind's fluffy plume
is struggling with the curtain. I know you can hear
both, not becoming distinct, no matter for whom.
The Old Sexton
© Park Benjamin
Nigh to a grave that was newly made,
Leaned a sexton old on his earth-worn spade;
The Passing Of Arthur
© Alfred Tennyson
That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,
First made and latest left of all the knights,
Told, when the man was no more than a voice
In the white winter of his age, to those
With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.
Wayfearen
© William Barnes
The sky wer clear, the zunsheen glow'd
On droopèn flowers drough the day,
Satyr IX. The State Of Love Imitated Fm An Elegy Of Mons:r Desportes
© Thomas Parnell
Hence lett us hence with Just abhorrence go
for ill their happyness these mortalls know
Who slight the mighty favours I bestow
The Stones
© Sylvia Plath
This is the city where men are mended.
I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky-circle
The Mountain Splitter
© Henry Lawson
HE WORKS in the glen where the waratah grows,
And the gums and the ashes are tall,
Neath cliffs that re-echo the sound of his blows
When the wedges leap in from the mawl.
A Ballad Of Suicide
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbourson the wall
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
Boaz Asleep
© Victor Marie Hugo
Boaz, overcome with weariness, by torchlight
made his pallet on the threshing floor
where all day he had worked, and now he slept
among the bushels of threshed wheat.
She Spins Silk
© Li Po
Far up river in Szechuan,
waters rise as spring winds roar.How can I dare to meet her now,
to brave the dangerous gorge?The grass grows green in the valley below
where silk worms silently spin.Her hands work threads that never end,
In The Shadow Of The Beeches
© Madison Julius Cawein
In the shadow of the beeches,
Where the fragile wildflowers bloom;
A Problem In Dynamics
© James Clerk Maxwell
An inextensible heavy chain
Lies on a smooth horizontal plane,
An impulsive force is applied at A,
Required the initial motion of K.
Madam And Her Madam
© Langston Hughes
I worked for a woman,
She wasn't mean--
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.
