History poems
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Dorchester Amphitheatre .
© John Kenyon
By Rome's old amphitheatre I stood,
Still pretty perfect, on the Weymouth road,
The Heavy Dragoon
© William Schwenck Gilbert
If you want a receipt for that popular mystery,
Known to the world as a Heavy Dragoon,
Why We Fight
© Edgar Albert Guest
This is the thing we fight:
A cry of terror in the night;
A ship on work of mercy bent
A carrier of the sick and maimed
Beneath the cruel waters sent,
And those that did it, unashamed.
The Door (I)
© Robert Creeley
It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.
Hero And Leander. The Fourth Sestiad
© George Chapman
Now from Leander's place she rose, and found
Her hair and rent robe scatter'd on the ground;
The Golden Legend: III. A Street In Strasburg
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
_Crier of the dead (ringing a bell)._ Wake! wake!
All ye that sleep!
Pray for the Dead!
Pray for the Dead!
A Deepe Groane Fetch'd at the Funerall of that incomparable and Glorious Monarch, CHARLES THE FIRST
© Henry King
To speak our Griefes as full over thy Tombe
(Great Soul) we should be Thunder-struck, and dumbe:
The Moon At The Fortified Pass
© Li Po
The bright moon lifts from the Mountain of Heaven
In an infinite haze of cloud and sea,
And the wind, that has come a thousand miles,
Beats at the Jade Pass battlements....
An Invitation
© James Russell Lowell
Nine years have slipt like hour-glass sand
From life's still-emptying globe away,
Since last, dear friend, I clasped your hand,
And stood upon the impoverished land,
Watching the steamer down the bay.
Macaulay's New Zealander.
© James Brunton Stephens
IT little profits that, an idle man,
On this worn arch, in sight of wasted halls,
Pennsylvania Hall
© John Greenleaf Whittier
NOT with the splendors of the days of old,
The spoil of nations, and barbaric gold;
No weapons wrested from the fields of blood,
Where dark and stern the unyielding Roman stood,
Fireflies
© Rabindranath Tagore
My fancies are fireflies,
Specks of living light
twinkling in the dark.
The Burden of Nineveh
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
In our Museum galleries
To-day I lingered o'er the prize
The Gift Of Harun Al-Rashid
© William Butler Yeats
KUSTA BEN LUKA is my name, I write
To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow-roysterer once,
Now the good Caliph's learned Treasurer,
And for no ear but his.
The Instructiphone
© Carolyn Wells
There was a youthful genius once, a boy of thirteen years,
Named Cyrus Franklin Edison Lavoisier De Squeers.
To study he was not inclined, for fun he had a bent;
But there was just one article he wanted to invent.
The Miller's Maid
© Robert Bloomfield
Near the high road upon a winding stream
An honest Miller rose to Wealth and Fame:
The noblest Virtues cheer'd his lengthen'd days,
And all the Country echo'd with his praise:
His Wife, the Doctress of the neighb'ring Poor,
Drew constant pray'rs and blessings round his door.
Alsace-Lorraine
© George Meredith
Yet the like aerial growths may chance be the delicate sprays,
Infant of Earth's most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal
For entry on Life's upper fields: and soul thus flourishing pays
The martyr's penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.
Forest History
© George Meredith
Beneath the vans of doom did men pass in.
Heroic who came out; for round them hung
A wavering phantom's red volcano tongue,
With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:
