Work poems
/ page 287 of 355 /
Godwin James
© Edgar Lee Masters
Harry Wilmans! You who fell in a swamp
Near Manila, following the flag,
You were not wounded by the greatness of a dream,
Or destroyed by ineffectual work,
Widow McFarlane
© Edgar Lee Masters
I was the Widow McFarlane,
Weaver of carpets for all the village.
And I pity you still at the loom of life,
You who are singing to the shuttle
Felix Schmidt
© Edgar Lee Masters
It was only a little house of two rooms --
Almost like a child's play-house --
With scarce five acres of ground around it;
And I had so many children to feed
Schroeder the Fisherman
© Edgar Lee Masters
I sat on the bank above Bernadotte
And dropped crumbs in the water,
Just to see the minnows bump each other,
Until the strongest got the prize.
Oaks Tutt
© Edgar Lee Masters
My mother was for woman's rights
And my father was the rich miller at London Mills.
I dreamed of the wrongs of the world and wanted to right them.
When my father died, I set out to see peoples and countries
The Seedling
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
AS a quiet little seedling
Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
And this is what it said:
Aner Clute
© Edgar Lee Masters
Over and over they used to ask me,
While buying the wine or the beer,
In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,
The Resurrection And The Life
© John Newton
I Am, saith Christ our glorious head,
(May we attention give)
The resurrection of the dead,
The life of all that live.
Amos Sibley
© Edgar Lee Masters
Not character, not fortitude, not patience
Were mine, the which the village thought I had
In bearing with my wife, while preaching on,
Doing the work God chose for me.
Peleg Poague
© Edgar Lee Masters
Horses and men are just alike.
There was my stallion, Billy Lee,
Black as a cat and trim as a deer,
With an eye of fire, keen to start,
Snarleyow
© Rudyard Kipling
They was movin' into action, they was needed very sore,
To learn a little schoolin' to a native army corps,
They 'ad nipped against an uphill, they was tuckin' down the brow,
When a tricky, trundlin' roundshot give the knock to ~Snarleyow~.
The Building
© Philip Larkin
Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
Ariel And Caliban
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
I.
Before PROSPERO'S cell. Moonlight.
ARIEL.
So Prospero is gone and I am free
Archibald Higbie
© Edgar Lee Masters
I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,
I was ashamed of you. I despised you
As the place of my nativity.
And there in Rome, among the artists,
Judge Selah Lively
© Edgar Lee Masters
Suppose you stood just five feet two,
And had worked your way as a grocery clerk,
Studying law by candle light
Until you became an attorney at law?
The Emigrant Mother
© William Wordsworth
Once having seen her clasp with fond embrace
This Child, I chanted to myself a lay,
Endeavouring, in our English tongue, to trace
Such things as she unto the Babe might say:
And thus, from what I heard and knew, or guessed,
My song the workings of her heart expressed.
The Widow of Nain
© George MacDonald
Forth from the city, with the load
That makes the trampling low,
They walk along the dreary road
That dust and ashes go.
The Sermon of the Birds
© Roland Robinson
I was clearing thirty or forty acres once
Out in the western range near Nightcap Mountain.
