History poems
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Jubilo
© Allen Tate
Tail-spinning from the shelves of sky
See how it dips and tacks and tosses
To cast a beam in the mind's eye:
Who will count the gains and the losses
On the Day of Jubilo?
Poetry: A Metrical Essay, Read Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Harvard
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!
Ye winds of Memory, sweep the silent lyre!
Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear,
Break through the clouds of Fancyâs waning year;
Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow,
If leaf or blossom still is fresh below!
The Hired Man And Floretty
© James Whitcomb Riley
The Hired Man's supper, which he sat before,
In near reach of the wood-box, the stove-door
And one leaf of the kitchen-table, was
Somewhat belated, and in lifted pause
His dextrous knife was balancing a bit
Of fried mush near the port awaiting it.
Verse
© Nizar Qabbani
1
Friends
The old word is dead.
The old books are dead.
Our speech with holes like worn-out shoes is dead.
Dead is the mind that led to defeat.
The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto XII
© Edmund Spenser
THE SECOND BOOKE OF THE FAERIE QUEENE
Contayning
THE LEGEND OF SIR GUYON,
OR OF TEMPERAUNCECANTO XIIxlii
Fit The Fifth - The Beavers Lesson
© Lewis Carroll
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
Winter Landscape
© John Berryman
The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
The Roman Gravemounds
© Thomas Hardy
By Rome's dim relics there walks a man,
Eyes bent; and he carries a basket and spade;
I guess what impels him to scrape and scan;
Yea, his dreams of that Empire long decayed.
How A Girl Was Too Reckless Of Grammar
© Guy Wetmore Carryl
In one's language one conservative should be;
Speech is silver and it never should be free!
The Assimilation Of The Gypsies
© Larry Levis
In the background, a few shacks & overturned carts
And a gray sky holding the singular pallor of Lent.
And here the crowd of onlookers, though a few of them
Must be intimate with the victim,
The Deodand
© Anthony Evan Hecht
What are these women up to? Theyve gone and strung
Drapes over the windows, cutting out light
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 1. The Landlord's Tale; Paul Revere's Ride
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
A Flower Of A Day
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
OLD friend, that with a pale and pensile grace
Climbest the lush hedgerows, art thou back again,
Marking the slow round of the wond'rous years?
Didst beckon me a moment, silent flower?
Idyll XXV. Heracles the Lion Slayer
© Theocritus
To whom thus spake the herdsman of the herd,
Pausing a moment from his handiwork:
"Friend, I will solve thy questions, for I fear
The angry looks of Hermes of the roads.
No dweller in the skies is wroth as he,
With him who saith the asking traveller nay.
The Child Of The Islands - Spring
© Caroline Norton
I.
WHAT shalt THOU know of Spring? A verdant crown
Of young boughs waving o'er thy blooming head:
White tufted Guelder-roses, showering down
Sonnet
© Emma Lazarus
STILL northward is the central mount of Maine,
From whose high crown the rugged forests seem
Like shaven lawns, and lakes with frequent gleam,
"Like broken mirrors," flash back light again.
The Wars and the Unknown Soldier
© Conrad Aiken
Under Osiris,
him of the Egyptian priests, Osynmandyas the King,
easward into Asia we passed, swarmed over Bactria,
three thousand years before Christ.
Georgic 4
© Publius Vergilius Maro
Of air-born honey, gift of heaven, I now
Take up the tale. Upon this theme no less
The Roman: A Dramatic Poem
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
SCENE I.
A Plain in Italy-an ancient Battle-field. Time, Evening.
Persons.-Vittorio Santo, a Missionary of Freedom. He has gone out, disguised as a Monk, to preach the Unity of Italy, the Overthrow of Austrian Domination, and the Restoration of a great Roman Republic.--A number of Youths and Maidens, singing as they dance. 'The Monk' is musing.
Enter Dancers.
