All Poems
/ page 2408 of 3210 /
The Reverie of Poor Susan
© William Wordsworth
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
The Wedding Ring Dance
© Anne Sexton
I dance in circles holding
the moth of the marriage,
thin, sticky, fluttering
its skirts, its webs.
Epitaph On An Infant.
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Its balmy lips the infant blest
Relaxing from its mother's breast,
How sweet it heaves the happy sigh
Of innocent satiety!
Elegy In The Classroom
© Anne Sexton
In the thin classroom, where your face
was noble and your words were all things,
I find this boily creature in your place;
If Hope Grew On A Bush
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
If hope grew on a bush,
And joy grew on a tree,
The Ambition Bird
© Anne Sexton
So it has come to this
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine
Birds And Bards
© Franklin Pierce Adams
When Milton sang "O nightingale
That on yon gloomy spray,"
The sonneteer whom we revere
Lauded that birdie's lay.
Locked Doors
© Anne Sexton
I would like to unlock that door,
turn the rusty key
and hold each fallen one in my arms
but I cannot, I cannot.
I can only sit here on earth
at my place at the table.
Standing On Tiptoe
© George Frederick Cameron
STANDING on tiptoe ever since my youth
Striving to grasp the future just above,
I hold at length the only futureTruth,
And Truth is Love.
The Gold Key
© Anne Sexton
The speaker in this case
is a middle-aged witch, me-
tangled on my two great arms,
my face in a book
A Wedding Song
© Jean Ingelow
And they said, “He is young, the lad we love,
The heir of the Isles is young:
How we deem of his mother, and one gone above,
Can neither be said nor sung.
Again and Again and Again
© Anne Sexton
You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
Goodbye My Lover
© Margaret Widdemer
All the flags stream abroad, and the crowds wave and cry
And I watch for your face in the long lines marching by;
For my lips bade you go, but my heart would bid you stay
Oh, lad, and will the war be long, and you so far away?
And your step as you marched, would it lag or fall more true
If you know that my heart's gone to war to follow you?
Lessons In Hunger
© Anne Sexton
"Do you like me?"
I asked the blue blazer.
No answer.
Silence bounced out of his books.
Wallflower
© Anne Sexton
Come friend,
I have an old story to tell youListen.
Sit down beside me and listen.
My face is red with sorrow
Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying
© John Berryman
'Death is the mother of beauty.' Awry no leaf
Shivering with delight, we die to be well..
Careless with sleepy love, so long unloving.
What if our convalescence must be bried
As we are, the matin meet the passing bell?..
About our pines our sister, wind, is moving.
The Temptation
© Edith Nesbit
YOU bring your love too late, dear, I have no love to buy it,
I spent my love on worthless toys, at fairs you do not know;
I am a bankrupt trader--dear eyes, do not deny it,
I could have bought your love, dear, but that was long ago.
August 17th
© Anne Sexton
Good for visiting hospitals or charitable work. Take some time to attend to your health.Surely I will be disquieted
by the hospital, that body zone--
bodies wrapped in elastic bands,
bodies cased in wood or used like telephones,
The Evil Seekers
© Anne Sexton
We are born with luck
which is to say with gold in our mouth.
As new and smooth as a grape,
as pure as a pond in Alaska,
