Great poems

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Burning Off

© Dorothea Mackellar

They're burning off at the Rampadells,
The tawny flames uprise,
With greedy licking around the trees;
The fierce breath sears our eyes.

NOTE.Rahel Robert and Varnhagen von Ense were married, after many protestations on her part, in 1814. The marriageso far as he was concerned at any rateappears to have been satisfactory.
Now you have read them all; or if not all,
As many as in all conscience I should fancy
To be enough. There are no more of them

The Three Taverns

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

When the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as Appii Forum, and The Three Taverns.(Acts xxviii, 15)
Herodion, Apelles, Amplias,
And Andronicus? Is it you I see
At last? And is it you now that are gazing

The Book of Annandale

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

IPartly to think, more to be left alone,
George Annandale said something to his friends
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gazeand went upstairs;

Llewellyn and the Tree

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Could he have made Priscilla share
The paradise that he had planned,
Llewellyn would have loved his wife
As well as any in the land.

Rembrandt to Rembrandt

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

(AMSTERDAM, 1645)
And there you are again, now as you are.
Observe yourself as you discern yourself
In your discredited ascendency;

The Torrent

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

I found a torrent falling in a glen
Where the suns light shone silvered and leaf-split;
The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it
All made a magic symphony; but when

Demos

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

All you that are enamored of my name
And least intent on what most I require,
Beware; for my design and your desire,
Deplorably, are not as yet the same.

Hillcrest

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

No sound of any storm that shakes
Old island walls with older seas
Comes here where now September makes
An island in a sea of trees.

On the Way

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

But why forget them? Theyre the same that winked
Upon the world when Alcibiades
Cut off his dogs tail to induce distinction.
There are dogs yet, and Alcibiades
Is not forgotten.

As a World Would Have It

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Shall I never make him look at me again?
I look at him, I look my life at him,
I tell him all I know the way to tell,
But there he stays the same.

Merlin

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Gawaine, Gawaine, what look ye for to see,
So far beyond the faint edge of the world?
Dye look to see the lady Vivian,
Pursued by divers ominous vile demons

The Man Against the Sky

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Between me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,

The Gift of God

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Blessed with a joy that only she
Of all alive shall ever know,
She wears a proud humility
For what it was that willed it so -

Captain Craig

II doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,
Or called him by his name, or looked at him
So curiously, or so concernedly,

Aunt Imogen

Aunt Imogen was coming, and therefore
The childrenJane, Sylvester, and Young George
Were eyes and ears; for there was only one
Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world,

An Island

Take it away, and swallow it yourself.
Ha! Look you, theres a rat.
Last night there were a dozen on that shelf,
And two of them were living in my hat.

Cassandra

I heard one who said: "Verily,
What word have I for children here?
Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.

Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford

You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass's head in Fairyland
As he would add a shilling to more shillings,

Octaves

I We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel --