All Poems

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How came the lily maid by that good shield
Of Lancelot, she that knew not even his name?
He left it with her, when he rode to tilt
For the great diamond in the diamond jousts,
Which Arthur had ordained, and by that name
Had named them, since a diamond was the prize.

During the War

© Philip Levine

When my brother came home from war
he carried his left arm in a black sling
but assured us most of it was still there.
Spring was late, the trees forgot to leaf out.

Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath

© Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This Sycamore, oft musical with bees,

Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed

But in the Wine-presses the Human Grapes Sing not nor Dance

© William Blake

They dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan,
They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them to one another:
These are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous play,
Tears of the grape, the death sweat of the cluster, the last sigh
Of the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah.--

Robert Frost at Eighty

© John Howard Payne

I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known.

I would like to find them.

Hymn to Science

© Mark Akenside

But first with thy resistless light,
Disperse those phantoms from my sight,
Those mimic shades of thee;
The scholiast's learning, sophist's cant,
The visionary bigot's rant,
The monk's philosophy.

To Mr. H. Lawes, On His Airs

© Patrick Kavanagh

Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song

First taught our English music how to span

Definition of the Frontiers

© Archibald MacLeish

First there is the wind but not like the familiar wind but long and without lapses or falling away or surges of air as is usual but rather like the persistent pressure of a river or a running tide.
This wind is from the other side and has an odor unlike the odor of the winds with us but like time if time had odor and were cold and carried a bitter and sharp taste like rust on the taste of snow or the fragrance of thunder.
When the air has this taste of time the frontiers are not far from us.
Then too there are the animals. There are always animals under the small trees. They belong neither to our side nor to theirs but are wild and because they are animals of such kind that wildness is unfamiliar in them as the horse for example or the goat and often sheep and dogs and like creatures their wandering there is strange and even terrifying signaling as it does the violation of custom and the subversion of order.

Book Of Suleika - Suleika 03

© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

ZEPHYR, for thy humid wing,

Oh, how much I envy thee!

History Lesson

© Natasha Trethewey

I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips

R.b.

© Aubrey Herbert

It was April we left Lemnos, shining sea and snow-white camp,
Passing onward into darkness. Lemnos shone a golden lamp,
As a low harp tells of thunder, so the lovely Lemnos air
Whispered of the dawn and battle; and we left a comrade there.

The Victory

© Anna Akhmatova

Over a pier, the first beacon inflamed --
The vanguard of other sea-rangers;
The mariner cried and bared his head;
He sailed with death beside and ahead
In seas, packed with furious dangers.

Lines from a Plutocratic Poetaster to a Ditch-digger

© Edwin Morgan

Sullen, grimy, labouring person,

As I passed you in my car,

The Exiles Secret

Why tell each idle guess, each whisper vain?
Enough: the scorched and cindered beams remain.
He came, a silent pilgrim to the West,
Some old-world mystery throbbing in his breast;
Close to the thronging mart he dwelt alone;
He lived; he died. The rest is all unknown.

A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body

SOUL

O who shall, from this dungeon, raise

From Generation To Generation

O Son of mine, when dusk shall find thee bending
Between a gravestone and a cradle's head---
Between the love whose name is loss unending
And the young love whose thoughts are liker dread,---
Thou too shalt groan at heart that all thy spending
Cannot repay the dead, the hungry dead.

Reverie in Open Air

© Rita Dove

I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits
Out of sync with wasp and wren.
I admit I don’?t know how
To sit still or move without purpose.
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.

spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear