All Poems

/ page 1674 of 3210 /

Order by :

Till a swift terror broke the abrupt hour.
The gold waves purled amidst the green above her;
And a bird sang. With one sharp-taken breath,
By sunlit branches and unshaken flower,
The immortal limbs flashed to the human lover,
And the immortal eyes to look on death.

Mirabeau Bridge

© Guillaume Apollinaire

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
And lovers
Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain

from Dante Études: Book Three: In My Youth Not Unstaind

© Robert Duncan

Now, upon old age: “Our life
has a fixt course and a simple path”
I would not avoid, “that of our right nature”
—then Dante adds, himself quoting:
“and in every part of our life
place is given for certain things”:

Bohemia

© Dorothy Parker

Authors and actors and artists and such

Never know nothing, and never know much.

Love's Witness

© Aphra Behn

Slight unpremeditated Words are borne
By every common Wind into the Air;
Carelessly utterd, die as soon as born,
And in one instant give both Hope and Fear:
Breathing all Contraries with the same Wind
According to the Caprice of the Mind.

Clitophon And Lucippe Translated. To The Ladies

© Richard Lovelace

A new dispute there lately rose
Betwixt the Greekes and Latines, whose
Temples should be bound with glory,
In best languaging this story;

The Fable

© Yvor Winters

Beyond the steady rock the steady sea,

In movement more immovable than station,

Proud With the Spoils of Royal Cully

© Charles Sackville

Proud with the spoils of royal cully,
With false pretence to wit and parts,
She swaggers like a batter'd bully
To try the tempers of men's hearts.

A Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter, 1966

© James Wright

Varus, varus, gib mir meine Legionen wieder
Quick on my feet in those Novembers of my loneliness,
I tossed a short pass,
Almost the instant I got the ball, right over the head
Of Barrel Terry before he knocked me cold.

His Shield

© Marianne Clarke Moore

The pin-swin or spine-swine
(the edgehog miscalled hedgehog) with all his edges out,
echidna and echinoderm in distressed-
pin-cushion thorn-fur coats, the spiny pig or porcupine,
the rhino with horned snout
everything is battle-dressed.

The Amenities

© Heather McHugh

I owe you an explanation.
My first memory isn’t your own
of an empty box. My babyhood cabinets held
a countlessness of cakes, my backyard
rotted into apple glut, windfalls of
money-tree, mouthfuls of fib.

Clenched Soul

© Pablo Neruda

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

Vita Nova

© Louise Gluck

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Humboldts Birthday

© Oliver Wendell Holmes

ERE yet the warning chimes of midnight sound,
Set back the flaming index of the year,
Track the swift-shifting seasons in their round
Through fivescore circles of the swinging sphere!

The Two Armies

© Henry Timrod

Two armies stand enrolled beneath

The banner with the starry wreath;

Sir Peter Harpdon's End

John Curzon
Of those three prisoners, that before you came
We took down at St. John's hard by the mill,
Two are good masons; we have tools enough,
And you have skill to set them working.

There Is a Safe and Secret Place

There is a safe and secret place,
Beneath the wings divine,
Reserved for all the heirs of grace;
O be that refuge mine!

They shut me up in Prose (445)

They shut me up in Prose
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me still

Thebais - Book One - part III

Oh race confedrate into crimes, that prove

Triumphant oer th eluded rage of Jove!

Faults

They came to tell your faults to me,
They named them over one by one;
I laughed aloud when they were done,
I knew them all so well before, —
Oh, they were blind, too blind to see
Your faults had made me love you more.