Great poems
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Fragments
© Alan Seeger
There was a time when I thought much of Fame,
And laid the golden edifice to be
That in the clear light of eternity
Should fitly house the glory of my name.
An Ode to Antares
© Alan Seeger
At dusk, when lowlands where dark waters glide
Robe in gray mist, and through the greening hills
The hoot-owl calls his mate, and whippoorwills
Clamor from every copse and orchard-side,
A Message to America
© Alan Seeger
You have the grit and the guts, I know;
You are ready to answer blow for blow
You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard,
But your honor ends with your own back-yard;
Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France
© Alan Seeger
IAy, it is fitting on this holiday,
Commemorative of our soldier dead,
When -- with sweet flowers of our New England May
Hiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray --
At the Tomb of Napoleon
© Alan Seeger
I stood beside his sepulchre whose fame,
Hurled over Europe once on bolt and blast,
Now glows far off as storm-clouds overpast
Glow in the sunset flushed with glorious flame.
Paris, October 1936
© Cesar Vallejo
From all of this I am the only one who leaves.
From this bench I go away, from my pants,
from my great situation, from my actions,
from my number split side to side,
from all of this I am the only one who leaves.
The Swimmer
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
With short, sharp violent lights made vivid,
To the southward far as the sight can roam,
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
The seas that climb and the surfs that comb,
Gone
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
IN Collins Street standeth a statute tall,
A statue tall, on a pillar of stone,
Telling its story, to great and small,
Of the dust reclaimed from the sand waste lone;
Manhole Covers
© Karl Shapiro
The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
Hero and Leander: The First Sestiad
© Christopher Morley
1 On Hellespont, guilty of true love's blood,
2 In view and opposite two cities stood,
3 Sea-borderers, disjoin'd by Neptune's might;
4 The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight.
A Ballad (thesis For A Doctor's Degree)
© Andrei Voznesensky
My doc announced yesterday :
"You may have talent, though it's hidden,
your beak, however, is frost-bitten,
so stick at home on a cold day".
The Antiworlds
© Andrei Voznesensky
There is Bukashkin, our neighbor,
in underpants of blotting paper,
and, like balloons, the Antiworlds
hang up above him in the vaults.
The Choir Invisible
© George Eliot
Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
God Needs Antonio
© George Eliot
'Tis God gives skill,
But not without men's hands: he could not make
Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel."
The Statesmen
© Ambrose Bierce
How blest the land that counts among
Her sons so many good and wise,
To execute great feats of tongue
When troubles rise.
In January
© Ted Kooser
Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
After Years
© Ted Kooser
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
© Omar Khayyám
I.
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
Winter
© Robert Southey
A wrinkled crabbed man they picture thee,
Old Winter, with a rugged beard as grey
As the long moss upon the apple-tree;
Blue-lipt, an icedrop at thy sharp blue nose,
The Triumph Of Woman
© Robert Southey
Her form of majesty, her eyes of fire
Chill with respect, or kindle with desire.
The admiring multitude her charms adore,
And own her worthy of the crown she wore.
