Happiness poems
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Dotage
© George Herbert
False glozing pleasures, casks of happinesse,
Foolish night-fires, women's and children's wishes,
Chases in arras, guilded emptinesse,
Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroider'd lyes, nothing between two dishes;
These are the pleasures here.
A Souless Singer
© Alfred Austin
Hail! throstle, by thy ringing voice descried,
Not by the wanderings of the tuneless wing!
Now once again where forkëd boughs divide,
Lost in green leafage thou dost perch and sing:
Trilling, shrilling, far and wide,
``It is Spring.''
The Creek of the Four Graves [Late Version]
© Charles Harpur
A settler in the olden times went forth
With four of his most bold and trusted men
The Task: Book IV. -- The Winter Evening
© William Cowper
Hark! tis the twanging horn oer yonder bridge,
That with its wearisome but needful length
Olney Hymn 61: The Narrow Way
© William Cowper
What thousands never knew the road!
What thousands hate it when 'tis known!
None but the chosen tribes of God
Will seek or choose it for their own.
Prosopopoia : or, Mother Hubbards Tale
© Edmund Spenser
Yet he the name on him would rashly take,
Maugre the sacred Muses, and it make
A servant to the vile affection
Of such, as he depended most upon;
And with the sugrie sweete thereof allure
Chast Ladies eares to fantasies impure.
She
© Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev
I know her, her bitter silence,
Her tiredness of her words and cries,
Lives in the secret changing brightness
Of widened pupils of her eyes.
Come Si Quando
© Robert Seymour Bridges
How thickly the far fields of heaven are strewn with stars !
Tho* the open eye of day shendeth them with its glare
To the Moon [Earlier Version]
© Charles Harpur
WITH silent step behold her steal
Over those envious clouds that hid
The Bakchesarian Fountain
© Alexander Pushkin
Has treason scaled the harem's wall,
Whose height might treason's self appal,
And slavery's daughter fled his power,
To yield her to the daring Giaour?
Deborah
© Thomas Parnell
O King subdu'd! O Woman born to fame!
O Wake my fancy for the glorious theme,
O wake my fancy with the sense of praise,
O wake with warblings of triumphant lays.
The Land you rise in sultry suns invade,
But where you rise to sing you'le find a shade.
To The Birds
© Peter McArthur
HOW dare you sing such cheerful notes?
You show a woful lack of taste;
How dare you pour from happy throats
Such merry songs with raptured haste,
While all our poets wail and weep,
And readers sob themselves to sleep?
A Prayer
© Mikhail Lermontov
Faithful before thee, Mother of God, now kneeling,
Image miraculous and merciful--of thee
Not for my soul's health nor battles waged, beseeching,
Nor yet with thanks or penitence o'erwhelming me!
Imr El Kais
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Weep, ah weep love's losing, love's with its dwelling--place
set where the hills divide Dakhúli and Háumali.
Túdiha and Mikrat! There the hearths--stones of her
stand where the South and North winds cross--weave the sand--furrows.
