Experience poems
/ page 4 of 36 /
The Cotter's Saturday Night
© Robert Burns
"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor."
Gray
The Birth Of Flattery
© George Crabbe
Muse of my Spenser, who so well could sing
The passions all, their bearings and their ties;
Heredity
© John Liddell Kelly
But sadness mingles with my selfish joy,
At thought of what you may be called to bear.
Oh, passionate maid! Oh, glad, impulsive boy!
Your father's sad experience you must share -
Self-torture, the unfeeling world's annoy,
Gross pleasure, fierce exultance, grim despair!
Paradise Lost : Book IX.
© John Milton
No more of talk where God or Angel guest
With Man, as with his friend, familiar us'd,
Esther, A Sonnet Sequence: XLII
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
And so we went our way,--yes, hand in hand,
Like two lost children in some magic wood
Baffled and baffling with enchanter's wand
The various beasts that crossed us and withstood.
Vesalius In Zante
© Edith Wharton
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earths millions.
The Quid Pro Quo; Or The Mistakes
© Jean de La Fontaine
THIS scene just ended, t'other actor came,
Whose prompt arrival much surprised the dame,
For, as a husband, Clidamant had ne'er
Such ardour shown, he seemed beyond his sphere.
The lady to the girl imputed this,
And thought, to hint it, would not be amiss.
Seeing the Eclipse in Maine by Robert Bly: American Life in Poetry #165 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
In âThe Moose,â? a poem much too long to print here, the late Elizabeth Bishop was able to show a community being created from a group of strangers on a bus who come in contact with a moose on the highway. They watch it together and become one. Here Robert Bly of Minnesota assembles a similar community, around an eclipse. Notice how the experience happens to âwe,â? the group, not just to âme,â? the poet.
Seeing the Eclipse in Maine
It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,
We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard
And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun
Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.
The Soul That Loves God Finds Him Everywhere
© William Cowper
O thou, by long experience tried,
Near whom no grief can long abide;
My love! how full of sweet content
I pass my years of banishment!
The Meeting Of The Centuries
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
A CURIOUS vision, on mine eyes unfurled
In the deep night. I saw, or seemed to see,
Two Centuries meet, and sit down vis-a-vis,
Across the great round table of the world.
The Scout Toward Aldie
© Herman Melville
Nine Blue-coats went a-nutting
Slyly in Tennessee-
Not for chestnuts - better than that-
Hugh, you bumble-bee!
Nutting, nutting -
All through the year there's nutting!
Alfred And Janet
© Robert Bloomfield
At thirteen she was all that Heaven could send,
My nurse, my faithful clerk, my lively friend;
Last at my pillow when I sunk to sleep,
First on my threshold soon as day could peep:
I heard her happy to her heart's desire,
With clanking pattens, and a roaring fire.
Griselda: A Society Novel In Verse - Chapter III
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
How long they sat thus silent who shall say?
Griselda knew not. Time was far away;
She wanted courage to prepare her heart
For that last bitterest word of all, ``We part.''
And he cared naught for time. His Heaven was there,
Nor needed thought, nor speech, nor even prayer.
PARADOX. That Fruition destroyes Love
© Henry King
Love is our Reasons Paradox, which still
Against the judgment doth maintain the Will:
And governs by such arbitrary laws,
It onely makes the Act our Likings cause:
The Conference
© Charles Churchill
Grace said in form, which sceptics must agree,
When they are told that grace was said by me;
Rhymed Plea For Tolerance - Dialogue I
© John Kenyon
Yet the heart vents still more indignant blame,
Where Lawgivers their sullen codes proclaim,
And idly would constrain the creed within,
As if Belief were Crime, and ToleranceSin.
The Minstrel ; Or, The Progress Of Genius - Book II.
© James Beattie
I.
Of chance or change O let not man complain,
Else shall he never never cease to wail:
For, from the imperial dome, to where the swain
Walter And Jane: Or, The Poor Blacksmith
© Robert Bloomfield
'We brav'd Life's storm together; while that Drone,
'Your poor old Uncle, WALTER, liv'd alone.
'He died the other day: when round his bed
'No tender soothing tear Affection shed--
'Affection! 'twas a plant he never knew;--
'Why should he feast on fruits he never grew?'
Past And Future
© John Kenyon
Might well have marvelled what such form should mean.
But of that gray-haired group, which clustered round,
Not one there was but knew the nameand sighed
Whenaskingit was answered them "Regret."
Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind. In Three Cantos. - Canto II.
© Matthew Prior
Richard, quoth Matt, these words of thine
Speak something sly and something fine;
But I shall e'en resume my theme,
However thou may'st praise or blame.
