Freedom poems
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The Mores
© John Clare
Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring's blossoms on its brow
Remembrances
© John Clare
Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on
I tried to call them back but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away
The Sign-Post
© Edward Thomas
The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hill-top by the finger-post;
Jacob Goodpasture
© Edgar Lee Masters
When Fort Sumter fell and the war came
I cried out in bitterness of soul:
"O glorious republic now no more!"
When they buried my soldier son
Ballad of Reading Gaol II
© Oscar Wilde
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
To George Herwegh
© Heinrich Heine
Herwegh, you lark of iron!
You rise on a swift and jubilant wing,
Toward sunlight and freedom, Liberty's lover!
Is the long winter really over?
Is Germany really awake to the Spring?
John Cabanis
© Edgar Lee Masters
Neither spite, fellow citizens,
Nor forgetfulness of the shiftlessness,
And the lawlessness and waste
Under democracy's rule in Spoon River
Elijah Browning
© Edgar Lee Masters
I was among multitudes of children
Dancing at the foot of a mountain.
A breeze blew out of the east and swept them as leaves,
Driving some up the slopes.... All was changed.
Ariel And Caliban
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
I.
Before PROSPERO'S cell. Moonlight.
ARIEL.
So Prospero is gone and I am free
Anthony Findlay
© Edgar Lee Masters
Both for the country and for the man,
And for a country as well as a man,
'Tis better to be feared than loved.
And if this country would rather part
The Spooniad
© Edgar Lee Masters
[The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for the first time published in Reedy's Mirror of December 18th, 1914.]
Of John Cabanis' wrath and of the strife
Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
Who led the common people in the cause
Mrs. Williams
© Edgar Lee Masters
I was the milliner
Talked about, lied about,
Mother of Dora,
Whose strange disappearance
To A Southern Statesman
© John Greenleaf Whittier
IS this thy voice whose treble notes of fear
Wail in the wind? And dost thou shake to hear,
Thursos Landing
© Robinson Jeffers
In the night Reave dreamed that Helen
Lay with him in the deep grave, he awoke loathing her,
But when the weak moment between sleep and waking
Was past, his need of her and his judgment of her
Knew their suspended duel; and he heard her breathing,
Irregularly, gently in the dark.
Roger Heston
© Edgar Lee Masters
Oh many times did Ernest Hyde and I
Argue about the freedom of the will.
My favorite metaphor was Prickett's cow
Roped out to grass, and free you know as far
The Widow Of Crescentius : Part I.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
'Midst Tivoli's luxuriant glades,
Bright-foaming falls, and olive shades,
Marie Bateson
© Edgar Lee Masters
You observe the carven hand
With the index finger pointing heavenward.
That is the direction, no doubt.
But how shall one follow it?
