Work poems
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A Greek Girl
© Amy Levy
Alas, alas, such idle thoughts are vain!
O cruel, cruel sunlight, get thee gone!
O dear, dim shades of eve, come swiftly on!
That when quick lips, keen eyes, are closed in sleep,
Through the long night till dawn I then may weep.
Dedication - Songs of Labor
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I WOULD the gift I offer here
Might graces from thy favor take,
The Oak
© James Russell Lowell
What gnarled stretch, what depth of shade, is his!
There needs no crown to mark the forest's king;
He came unto His own, and His own received Him not
© Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
As Christ the Lord was passing by,
He came, one night, to a cottage door.
He came, a poor man, to the poor;
He had no bed whereon to lie.
Spiritual Laws
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,
Gorgeous Surfaces
© Thomas Lux
They are, the surfaces, gorgeous: a master
pastry chef at work here, the dips and whorls,
the wrist-twist
squeezes of cream from the tube
The New York Skyscraper
© Madison Julius Cawein
The Woolworth Building
ENORMOUSLY it lifts
Its tower against the splendor of the west;
Like some wild dream that drifts
A Voice From The Factories
© Caroline Norton
WHEN fallen man from Paradise was driven,
Forth to a world of labour, death, and care;
Still, of his native Eden, bounteous Heaven
Resolved one brief memorial to spare,
The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball
© Thomas Lux
each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose
Alexis And Dora
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
FARTHER and farther away, alas! at each moment the vessel
Hastens, as onward it glides, cleaving the foam-cover'd flood!
"I Love You Sweatheart"
© Thomas Lux
A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
The Gay Gordons
© Sir Henry Newbolt
(Dargai, October 20, 1897)
Whos for the Gathering, who's for the Fair?
The Night Cometh
© John McCrae
Cometh the night. The wind falls low,
The trees swing slowly to and fro:
Around the church the headstones grey
Cluster, like children strayed away
But found again, and folded so.
Stanzas On Freedom
© James Russell Lowell
Men! whose boast it is that ye
Come of fathers brave and free,
In Due Season
© John McCrae
If night should come and find me at my toil,
When all Life's day I had, tho' faintly, wrought,
And shallow furrows, cleft in stony soil
Were all my labour: Shall I count it naught
Disarmament
© John McCrae
One spake amid the nations, "Let us cease
From darkening with strife the fair World's light,
We who are great in war be great in peace.
No longer let us plead the cause by might."
Of The Nature Of Things: Book IV - Part 03 - The Senses And Mental Pictures
© Lucretius
Bodies that strike the eyes, awaking sight.
From certain things flow odours evermore,
The New Year
© John Greenleaf Whittier
THE wave is breaking on the shore,
The echo fading from the chime;
Again the shadow moveth o'er
The dial-plate of time!
The Sleepers
© William Henry Davies
As I walked down the waterside
This silent morning, wet and dark;
Before the cocks in farmyards crowed,
Before the dogs began to bark;
Before the hour of five was struck
By old Westminster's mighty clock:
The Mind's Liberty
© William Henry Davies
The mind, with its own eyes and ears,
May for these others have no care;
No matter where this body is,
The mind is free to go elsewhere.
