Failure poems

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They spoke it bravely, grimly, in their darkest hours of doubt;
They spoke it when their hope was low and when their strength gave out;
We heard it from the dying in those troubled days now gone,
And they breathed it as their slogan for the living: "Carry on!"

Ballade Of The Average Reader

© Franklin Pierce Adams

Most read of readers, if you've read
The works of any old succeeder,
You know that he, too, must have said:
"I've never seen an Average Reader."

Failure

© Arlo Bates

Count not the trampled dead spared any strain
Because another won where was slain
Are hearts ignoble proved whose cause is lost?
Vain is the standard if success hide cost.

The Kalevala - Rune XXXI

© Elias Lönnrot

KULLERWOINEN SON OF EVIL.

Satyr III. Virtue

© Thomas Parnell

Is virtue something reall here below
Or but an Idle name & empty show
While on this head I take my thoughts to task
Methinks young Freedom answers wt I ask
In his own moralls thus the Spark goes on
Or thus if he were here he might have don

Going To The Horse Flats

© Robinson Jeffers

Sweet was the clear
Chatter of the stream now that our talk was hushed; the flitting
water-ouzel returned to her stone;
A lovely snake, two delicate scarlet lines down the dark back,
swam through the pool. The flood-battered
Trees by the stream are more noble than cathedral-columns.

Fand, A Feerie Act I

© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Eithne's Spinning Song
Things of the Earth and things of the Air,
Strengths that we feel though we cannot share,
Shapes that are round us and everywhere.

An Inventor

© Augusta Davies Webster

I thought this time 'twas done at last,
the workings perfected, the life in it;
and there's the flaw again, the petty flaw,
the fretting small impossibility
that has to be made possible.

Twenty-One Love Poems VII

© Adrienne Rich

Of Taking things Easy

© Arthur Maquarie

TELL me what boots to battle, when the end

Is foreseen failure? What, by heaven, I ask

A Book of Dreams: Part I

© George MacDonald

I lay and dreamed. The master came
In his old woven dress;
I stood in joy, and yet in shame,
Oppressed with earthliness.

When You Know A Fellow

© Edgar Albert Guest

When you get to know a fellow, know his joys and know his cares,
When you've come to understand him and the burdens that he bears,
When you've learned the fight he's making and the troubles in his way,
Then you find that he is different than you thought him yesterday.
You find his faults are trivial and there's not so much to blame
In the brother that you jeered at when you only knew his name.

Christmas Eve

BACK UP Old Age and Wrinkled Face,

Come, Selfish Grown-Up, quit the place,

The Sonnet

PURE form, that like some chalice of old time
Contain'st the liquid of the poet's thought
Within thy curving hollow, gem-enwrought
With interwoven traceries of rhyme,