Family poems

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43

The Obliterate Tomb

© Thomas Hardy

'More than half my life long
Did they weigh me falsely, to my bitter wrong,
But they all have shrunk away into the silence
Like a lost song.

Confession

© Charles Baudelaire

Une fois, une seule, aimable et douce femme,
À mon bras votre bras poli
S'appuya (sur le fond ténébreux de mon âme
Ce souvenir n'est point pâli);

Paradiso (English)

© Dante Alighieri

The glory of Him who moveth everything
Doth penetrate the universe, and shine
In one part more and in another less.

To The Right Honourable The Earl Of Thomond, At Bath

© Mary Barber

Great Boiroimke! look down and see
This Change in thy Posterity;
Who quit all Titles to thy Throne,
But Hospitality alone.

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;

Metrical Letter, Written From London.

© Robert Southey

Margaret! my Cousin!--nay, you must not smile;

I love the homely and familiar phrase;

Assumpta Maria

© Francis Thompson

Mortals, that behold a Woman,
Rising 'twixt the Moon and Sun;
Who am I the heavens assume? an
All am I, and I am one.

The Squatter's Man

© Anonymous

Come, all ye lads an' list to me,

That's left your homes an' crossed the sea,

Fragment

© Charlotte Turner Smith

Descriptive of the miseries of War; from a Poem
called "The Emigrants," printed in 1793.
TO a wild mountain, whose bare summit hides
Its broken eminence in clouds; whose steeps

The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society

© Oliver Goldsmith

Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow

Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po,

The Four Seasons : Autumn

© James Thomson

Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,
While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,
Comes jovial on; the Doric reed once more,
Well pleased, I tune. Whate'er the wintry frost

"Why so I will, you noisy bird,
This very day I'll advertise you,
Perhaps some busy ones may prize you.
A fine-tongued parrot as was ever heard,
I'll word it thus-set forth all charms about you,
And say no family should be without you."

Ode--"Shell the Old City! Shell!"

© William Gilmore Simms

I.

Shell the old city I shell!

In My Mother's House by Gloria g. Murray: American Life in Poetry #31 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate

© Ted Kooser

All of us have known tyrants, perhaps at the office, on the playground or, as in this poem, within a family. Here Long Island poet Gloria g. Murray portrays an authoritarian mother and her domain. Perhaps you've felt the tension in a scene like this.

The Microscopic Trout And The Machiavellian Fisherman

A fisher was casting his flies in a brook,

According to laws of such sciences,

A Life

© Sylvia Plath

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year --
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

I have allowed my family to scatter,
All those who were my dearest to depart,
And once again an age-long loneliness
Comes in to fill all nature and my heart.