All Poems
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Written to be Spoken by Mrs. Siddons
© Samuel Rogers
Yes, 'tis the pulse of life! my fears were vain!
I wake, I breathe, and am myself again.
Still in this nether world; no seraph yet!
Nor walks my spirit, when the sun is set,
An Empty Threat
© Robert Frost
I stay;
But it isn't as if
There wasn't always Hudson's Bay
And the fur trade,
A Star in a Stoneboat
© Robert Frost
Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.
A Hillside Thaw
© Robert Frost
To think to know the country and now know
The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!
As often as I've seen it done before
An Epistle Of The Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole
© Richard Savage
As the rich cloud by due degrees expands,
And show'rs down plenty thick on sundry lands,
Thy spreading worth in various bounty fell,
Made genius flourish, and made art excel.
A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears, and Some Books
© Robert Frost
Old Davis owned a solid mica mountain
In Dalton that would someday make his fortune.
There'd been some Boston people out to see it:
And experts said that deep down in the mountain
The mica sheets were big as plate-glass windows.
He'd like to take me there and show it to me.
A Cliff Dwelling
© Robert Frost
There sandy seems the golden sky
And golden seems the sandy plain.
No habitation meets the eye
Unless in the horizon rim,
Sonnet 136: "If thy soul check thee that I come so near,..."
© William Shakespeare
If thy soul check thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,
To E.T.
© Robert Frost
I slumbered with your poems on my breast
Spread open as I dropped them half-read through
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb
To see, if in a dream they brought of you,
The Vantage Point
© Robert Frost
And if by noon I have too much of these,
I have but to turn on my arm, and lo,
The sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow,
My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,
I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant,
I look into the crater of the ant.
Raking by Tania Rochelle: American Life in Poetry #87 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
The first poem we ran in this column was by David Allan Evans of South Dakota, about a couple washing windows together. You can find that poem and all the others on our website, www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. Here Tania Rochelle of Georgia presents us with another couple, this time raking leaves. I especially like the image of the pair âbent like parentheses/ around their brittle little lawn.â?
Today Is Sunday
© Nazim Hikmet
Today is Sunday.
For the first time they took me out into the sun today.
The Trial by Existence
© Robert Frost
Even the bravest that are slain
Shall not dissemble their surprise
On waking to find valor reign,
Even as on earth, in paradise;
The Times Table
© Robert Frost
More than halfway up the pass
Was a spring with a broken drinking glass,
And whether the farmer drank or not
His mare was sure to observe the spot
The Peaceful Shepherd
© Robert Frost
If heaven were to do again,
And on the pasture bars,
I leaned to line the figures in
Between the dotted starts,
Resurrection
© Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
I BURIED Joy; and early to the tomb
I came to weep--so sorrowful was I
Who had not dreamed that Joy, my Joy, could die.
The Onset
© Robert Frost
Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
