All Poems
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Fifteen Epitaphs I
© Louise Imogen Guiney
I laid the strewings, darling, on thine urn;
I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis.
Now hushaby, my little child, and learn
Long sleep how good it is.
This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
In the Past
© Trumbull Stickney
There lies a somnolent lake
Under a noiseless sky,
Where never the mornings break
Nor the evenings die.
To His Mistress Going to Bed
© John Donne
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
To the Western World
© Louis Simpson
A siren sang, and Europe turned away
From the high castle and the shepherd’s crook.
Three caravels went sailing to Cathay
On the strange ocean, and the captains shook
Their banners out across the Mexique Bay.
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
© John Ashbery
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
A.M. Fog
© Mark Jarman
Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking,
Holding on with dissolving hands,
Out of it came, not a line of old men,
But pairs of headlights, delaying morning.
The Shirt
© Jane Kenyon
The shirt touches his neck
and smooths over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.
Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites
© Charles Simic
They also piss against the wind,
Pour water in a leaky bucket.
Strike two tears to make fire,
And have tongues with bones in them,
Bones of a wolf gnawed by lambs.
To Rosa
© Abraham Lincoln
You are young, and I am older;
You are hopeful, I am not
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder
Pluck the roses ere they rot.
Ralegh’s Prizes
© Robert Pinsky
And Summer turns her head with its dark tangle
All the way toward us; and the trees are heavy,
With little sprays of limp green maple and linden
Adhering after a rainstorm to the sidewalk
Where yellow pollen dries in pools and runnels.
On the Beach at Night Alone
© Walt Whitman
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
In School-days
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow,
And blackberry-vines are creeping.
Hollywood Elegies
© Bertolt Brecht
Under the long green hair of pepper trees,
The writers and composers work the street.
Bach’s new score is crumpled in his pocket,
Dante sways his ass-cheeks to the beat.
Autumn Sky
© Charles Simic
In my great grandmother's time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.
