All Poems
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The Past Was Goodly Once
© William Ernest Henley
The Past was goodly once, and yet, when all is said,
The best of it we know is that it's done and dead.
Matisse
© Gertrude Stein
One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one. Certainly every one could be certain of this thing that this one is a great one.
AN ELEGY Upon Mrs. Kirk unfortunately drowned in Thames
© Henry King
For all the Ship-wracks, and the liquid graves
Lost men have gain'd within the furrow'd waves,
The Sea hath fin'd and for our wrongs paid use,
When its wrought foam a Venus did produce.
Two Pictures
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
SHE stood beneath the vine-leaves flushed and fair;
The dimpling smiles around her tender mouth,
Seemed born of mellow sunshine of the South;
A light breeze trembled in her unbound hair;
Maud; A Monodrama (from Part II)
© Alfred Tennyson
O that 'twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
How to Read Me
© Walter Savage Landor
TO turn my volumes oer nor find
(Sweet unsuspicious friend!)
Some vestige of an erring mind
To chide or discommend,
my dream about the second coming
© Paul Celan
when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.
Beowulf
© Charles Baudelaire
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
© Pablo Neruda
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
The Rope-Maker
© Emile Verhaeren
Of old--as one in sleep, life, errant, strayed
Its wondrous morns and fabled evenings through;
When God's right hand toward far Canaan's blue
Traced golden paths, deep in the twilight shade.
Fork
© Charles Simic
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
Children
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
A word will fill the little heart
With pleasure and with pride;
It is a harsh, a cruel thing,
That such can be denied.
"When day is over"
© Lesbia Harford
When day is over
I climb up the stair,
Take off my dark dress,
Pull down my hair,
Early Affection
© George Moses Horton
I lov’d thee from the earliest dawn,
When first I saw thy beauty’s ray,
The Twelve
© Allen Tate
There by some wrinkled stones round a leafless tree
With beards askew, their eyes dull and wild
Aphrodite Metropolis (1)
© Kenneth Fearing
"Myrtle loves Harry"—It is sometimes hard to remember a thing like that,
Hard to think about it, and no one knows what to do with it when he has it,
Past
© John Galsworthy
The clocks are chiming in my heart
Their cobweb chime;
Old murmurings of days that die,
The sob of things a-drifting by.
The clocks are chiming in my heart!
Earth Upon Earth
© Pierre Reverdy
Earth took of earth, earth with woe,
Earth other earth to the earth added;
Earth laid earth in an earthen grave.
Then had earth of earth enough earth.
