Failure poems
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The Peaks Of Valor
© Edgar Albert Guest
These are the peaks of valor; keeping clean your father's name,
Too brave for petty profit to risk the brand of shame,
Adventuring for the future, yet mindful of the past,
For God, for country and for home, still valorous to the last.
Myself My Song.
© Arthur Henry Adams
HERE, aloof, I take my stand
Alien, iconoclast
Poet of a newer land,
Confident, aggressive, lonely,
A Fable For Critics
© James Russell Lowell
'Why, nothing of consequence, save this attack
On my friend there, behind, by some pitiful hack,
Who thinks every national author a poor one,
That isn't a copy of something that's foreign,
And assaults the American Dick--'
Boy With His Hair Cut Short
© Muriel Rukeyser
SUNDAY shuts down on this twentieth-century evening.
The L passes. Twilight and bulb define
the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa,
the boy, and the girl's thin hands above his head.
A neighbor radio sings stocks, news, serenade.
On The Death of A Certain Journal
© Charles Kingsley
So die, thou child of stormy dawn,
Thou winter flower, forlorn of nurse;
Chilled early by the bigot's curse,
The pedant's frown, the worldling's yawn.
The Ring And The Book - Chapter I - The Ring And The Book
© Robert Browning
DO you see this Ring?
Tis Rome-work, made to match
To The Heroic Soul
© Duncan Campbell Scott
And when Grief comes thou shalt have suffered more
Than all the deepest woes of all the world;
Joy, dancing in, shall find thee nourished with mirth;
Wisdom shall find her Master at thy door;
And Love shall find thee crowned with love empearled;
And death shall touch thee not but a new birth.
For An Autograph
© James Russell Lowell
THOUGH old the thought and oft exprest,
'Tis his at last who says it best,
I'll try my fortune with the rest.
Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.
The Freeborn
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
God made the man and bid him multiply,
Replenish the green earth, nor break the die
Satan Absolved
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Angels. And we would know God's plan,
His true thought for the world, the wherefore and the why
Of His long patience mocked, His name in jeopardy.
We have no heart to serve without instructions new.
Hiawatha's Photographing
© Lewis Carroll
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
Mencius
© Sarah Knowles Bolton
Three centuries before the Christian age
China's great teacher, Mencius, was born;
A Photographic Failure
© Carolyn Wells
Mr. Hezekiah Hinkle
Saw a patient Periwinkle
With a kodak, sitting idly by a rill.
Feeling a desire awaken
For to have his picture taken,
Mr. Hezekiah Hinkle stood stock-still.
Western Camps
© Roderic Quinn
THREE men stood with their glasses lifted,
Night was around them and flaring lamps:
"Here's to the tried and true and sifted;
Here's to the flotsam tossed and drifted;
Scenes From The Faust Of Goethe
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
CHORUS:
Thy countenance gives the Angels strength,
Though none can comprehend Thee:
And all Thy lofty works
Are excellent as at the first day.
Catherine Helen Spence
© Anonymous
There was a Grand Dame of Australia
Who proved the block system a failure.
She taught creatures in coats
What to do with their votes,
This Effective Grand Dame of Australia!
Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot The Tyrant
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
'Choose Reform or Civil War,
When through thy streets, instead of hare with dogs,
A Consort-Queen shall hunt a King with hogs,
Riding on the IONIAN MINOTAUR.'
