All Poems
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The Cane-Bottom’d Chair
© William Makepeace Thackeray
In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,
And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,
Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I’ve a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.
To the Terrestrial Globe
© William Schwenck Gilbert
Roll on, thou ball, roll on!
Through pathless realms of Space
A Double Standard
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Do you blame me that I loved him?
If when standing all alone
I cried for bread a careless world
Pressed to my lips a stone.
Deserted
© Madison Julius Cawein
A broken rainbow on the skies of May
Touching the sodden roses and low clouds,
White Water
© Eamon Grennan
Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be
indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata
for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock
shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes
and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all
is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets.
A Winter Hymn
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O WEARY winds! O winds that wail!
O'er desert fields and ice-locked rills!
O heavens that brood so cold and pale
Above the frozen Norland hills!
House of Shadows. Home of Simile
© Eavan Boland
One afternoon of summer rain
my hand skimmed a shelf and I found
an old florin. Ireland, 1950.
The Brief Journey West
© Howard Nemerov
By the dry road the fathers cough and spit,
This is their room. They are the ones who hung
That bloody sun upon the southern wall
And crushed the armored beetle to the floor.
Sumer is i-cumin in
© Pierre Reverdy
Sumer is i-cumin in
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!
Epigram - Thy Nags, The Leanest Things Alive
© Matthew Prior
Thy nags, the leanest things alive,
So very hard thou lovest to drive,
I heard thy anxious coachman say
It costs thee more in whips than hay.
The Deserted Village
© Mark van Doren
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain,
The First Easter
© Edgar Albert Guest
Dead they left Him in the tomb
And the impenetrable gloom,
Rolled the great stone to the door,
Dead, they thought, forevermore.
Forty Little Polliwogs
© Pierre Reverdy
Forty little polliwogs
Swimming in a ditch,
Each so near alike,
They don't know which is which.
The Knight's Epitaph
© William Cullen Bryant
This is the church which Pisa, great and free,
Reared to St. Catharine. How the time-stained walls,
On the Seashore
© Anselm Hollo
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.
They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.
The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.
Sugar
© Gertrude Stein
A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet.
Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses.
A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise.
A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea.
Odysseus' Fate
© Konstantin Nikolaevich Batiushkov
Through horrors of land and horrors of sea
Bereft and wandering, Odysseus,
Autumn
© John Clare
The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
