All Poems
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My Garden
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I could put my woods in song
And tell what's there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void.
On An Icicle That Clung To The Grass Of A Grave
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
Oh! take the pure gem to where southerly breezes,
Waft repose to some bosom as faithful as fair,
In which the warm current of love never freezes,
Break of Day (another of the same)
© John Donne
'Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise, because 'tis light?
Did we lie down, because 'twas night?
Love which in spite of darkness brought us hither
Should in despite of light keep us together.
Delia XXXVI
© Samuel Daniel
But love whilst that thou mayst be loved again,
Now whilst thy May hath filled thy lap with flowers,
Morning And Night
© Madison Julius Cawein
... Fresh from bathing in orient fountains,
In wells of rock water and snow,
Comes the Dawn with her pearl-brimming fingers
O'er the thyme and the pines of yon mountain;
Where she steps young blossoms fresh blow....
A Letter of Recommendation
© John Wesley
On summer nights I sleep naked
in Jerusalem. My bed
stands on the brink of a deep valley
without rolling down into it.
October's Little Miseries
© Jules Laforgue
Every October I start to get upset.
The factories' hundred throats blow smoke to the sky.
The pullets are getting fat
for Christmas Day.
[I asked myself / What, Sappho, can...]
© Sappho
I asked myself
What, Sappho, can
you give one who
has everything,
like Aphrodite?
Banana Trees by Joseph Stanton: American Life in Poetry #119 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
I'm especially attracted to poems that describe places I might not otherwise visit, in the manner of good travel writing. I'm a dedicated stay-at-home and much prefer to read something fascinating about a place than visit it myself. Here the Hawaii poet, Joseph Stanton, describes a tree that few of us have seen but all of us have eaten from.
Banana Trees
They are tall herbs, really, not trees,
though they can shoot up thirty feet
if all goes well for them. Cut in cross
Fog
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Magically awakened to a strange, brown night
The streets lie cold. A hush of heavy gloom
Dulls the noise of the wheels to a murmur dead:
Near and sudden the passing figures loom;
Invocation to the Social Muse
© Archibald MacLeish
It is true also that we here are Americans:
That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual:
That more people have more thoughts: that there are
And Still It Comes
© Thomas Lux
like a downhill brakes-burned freight train
full of pig iron ingots, full of lead
The Shepherds Calendar - January- Winters Day
© John Clare
Withering and keen the winter comes
While comfort flyes to close shut rooms
And sees the snow in feathers pass
Winnowing by the window glass
You Smiled, You Spoke, and I Believed
© Heather Fuller
You smiled, you spoke, and I believed,
By every word and smile deceived.
Another man would hope no more;
Nor hope I what I hoped before:
But let not this last wish be vain;
Deceive, deceive me once again!
The Love Of Narcissus
© Alice Meynell
His dreams are far among the silent hills;
His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain
With winds at night; strange recognition thrills
His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;
He knows his sweet mirth in the mountain rills,
His weary tears that touch him with the rain.
To the Blank Spaces
© William Stanley Merwin
For longer than by now I can believe
I assumed that you had nothing to do
with each other I thought you had arrived
whenever that had been
Pipes O' Pan At Zekesbury
© James Whitcomb Riley
The pipes of Pan! Not idler now are they
Than when their cunning fashioner first blew
Drury-lane Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane, 1747
© Henry James Pye
When Learning’s triumph o’er her barb’rous foes
First rear’d the stage, immortal Shakespear rose;
