All Poems
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Happiness
© Jane Kenyon
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
The Watchers
© William Stanley Braithwaite
Two women on the lone wet strand
(The wind's out with a will to roam)
The waves wage war on rocks and sand,
(And a ship is long due home.)
"Now Goeth Sun Under Wood"
© Pierre Reverdy
Now goth sonne under wod:
Me reweth, Marye, thy faire rode.
Now goth sonne under tree:
Me reweth, Marye, thy sone and thee.
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes
© Thomas Gray
Twas on a lofty vases side,
Where Chinas gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
The Rebel
© Hilaire Belloc
There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homesteads and our native grounds.
Sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni
© Dante Alighieri
To the dim light and the large circle of shade
I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills,
There where we see no color in the grass.
Natheless my longing loses not its green,
It has so taken root in the hard stone
Which talks and hears as though it were a lady.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 118
© Alfred Tennyson
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
At Mass
© Roald Dahl
No doubt to-morrow I will hide
My face from you, my King.
Let me rejoice this Sunday noon,
And kneel while gray priests sing.
Sonnet LXIV: When I have Seen by Time's Fell Hand Defaced
© William Shakespeare
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
The Corn Baby
© Mark Wunderlich
They brought it. It was brought
from the field, the last sheaf, the last bundle
[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]
© Marilyn Hacker
Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?
Before a face suddenly numinous,
“A kiss on the forehead”
© Marina Tsvetaeva
A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.
“I Broke the Spell That Held Me Long”
© William Cullen Bryant
I broke the spell that held me long,
The dear, dear witchery of song.
I said, the poet’s idle lore
Shall waste my prime of years no more,
For Poetry, though heavenly born,
Consorts with poverty and scorn.
Toth Farry
© Sharon Olds
In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby
canines and incisors are mostly chaff,
The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue
© Geoffrey Chaucer
But for to tellen yow of his array,
His hors weren goode, but he was nat gay;
Of fustian he wered a gypon
Al bismótered with his habergeon;
For he was late y-come from his viage,
And wente for to doon his pilgrymage.
Modern Love: I
© George Meredith
By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
