All Poems
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From A Bachelors Private Journal
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
SWEET Mary, I have never breathed
The love it were in vain to name;
Though round my heart a serpent wreathed,
I smiled, or strove to smile, the same.
Three Verse Passages From A Prose Meditation
© Thomas Parnell
On verdurd trees ye silver blossoms grow
Whose leaves atop their perfect whiteness show
& faintly streak with stains of red below
The western breeze steales ore ye shady grove
to sigh near roses as insnard by love.
Fire Victim by Ned Balbo : American Life in Poetry #271 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
It’s not uncommon for people to turn their eyes away from those who bear the scars of misfortune. Here’s a poem about that by Ned Balbo, who lives and teaches in Maryland.
Fire Victim
Once, boarding the train to New York City,
Domestic Peace
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Tell me, on what holy ground
May domestic peace be found?
Halcyon daughter of the skies,
Far on fearful wing she flies,
Recollection
© Ada Cambridge
A wave-worn boulder, with green sea-moss wrapping
A silken mantle o'er its jagged sides;
And silvery, seething waters softly lapping
Through gulfs and channels hollow'd by the tides:
Henry The Hermit
© Robert Southey
It was a little island where he dwelt,
Or rather a lone rock, barren and bleak,
Little Bateese
© William Henry Drummond
Off on de fiel' you foller de plough
Den w'en you're tire you scare de cow
Sickin' de dog till dey jomp de wall
So de milk ain't good for not'ing at all-
An' you're only five an' a half dis fall,
Leetle Bateese!
from Book I, Paterson
© William Carlos Williams
-Say it, no ideas but in things-
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident-
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained-
secret-into the body of the light!
L' Allee
© Paul Verlaine
Powdered and rouged as in the sheepcotes' day,
Fragile 'mid her enormous ribbon bows,
The Bakchesarian Fountain
© Alexander Pushkin
Has treason scaled the harem's wall,
Whose height might treason's self appal,
And slavery's daughter fled his power,
To yield her to the daring Giaour?
What I Have Seen #1
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
I saw a mother give wine to her boy-
The rain-drops fall and fall:
The pride of his parents, a household joy,
A mother's blessing, her all.
Sonnet 76: She Comes, And Straight Therewith
© Sir Philip Sidney
She comes, and straight therewith her shining twins do move
Their rays to me, who in her tedious absence lay
Benighted in cold woe; but now appears my day,
The only light of joy, the only warmth of love.
Fain would I wed
© Thomas Campion
Fain would I wed a fair young man that night and day could please me,
When my mind or body grieved, that had the power to ease me.
Star-Gazer
© Louis MacNeice
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
Epistle (to the author of The Three Impostors)
© Voltaire
I see from afar that era coming, those happy days,
When philosophy, enlightening humanity,
Must lead them in peace to the feet of the common master;
Frightful fanaticism will tremble to appear there:
There will be less dogma with more virtue.
A Song For Christmas
© George MacDonald
Hark, in the steeple the dull bell swinging
Over the furrows ill ploughed by Death!
Hark the bird-babble, the loud lark singing!
Hark, from the sky, what the prophet saith!
September 1, 1802
© William Wordsworth
WE had a female Passenger who came
From Calais with us, spotless in array,--
A white-robed Negro, like a lady gay,
Yet downcast as a woman fearing blame;
