Money poems
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25. My Father was a Farmer: A Ballad
© Robert Burns
MY father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O,
And carefully he bred me in decency and order, O;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had neer a farthing, O;
For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding, O.
Called Into Play
© Archie Randolph Ammons
Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roadsand lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going tofind something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, lookdown, look up, look close, think, think, think:
Hermann And Dorothea - III. Thalia
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE BURGHERS.
THUS did the prudent son escape from the hot conversation,
How Do You Buy Your Money?
© Edgar Albert Guest
How do you buy your money? For money is bought and sold,
And each man barters himself on earth for his silver and shining gold,
And by the bargain he makes with men, the sum of his life is told.
Sunday In The Country
© Edgar Albert Guest
SUNDAY in the country that's how we spent the day,
Drinking in the perfume of the fragrant breath of May;
Gazing at the splendors of the meadows and the hills,
Laughing with the babbling brooks and singing with the rills,
Dancing with the sunbeams and smiling with the skies,
And worshiping the Master with our hearts and minds and eyes.
The Roads Of Happiness
© Edgar Albert Guest
The roads of happiness are not
The selfish roads of pleasure seeking,
from the Ansty Experience
© Rg Gregory
(a)
they seek to celebrate the word
not to bring their knives out on a poem
dissecting it to find a heart
The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun
© Stephen Vincent Benet
No herbage broke the barren flats of land,
No winds dared loiter within smiling trees,
Nor were there any brooks on either hand,
Only the dry, bright sand,
Naked and golden, lay before the seas.
The City Revisited
© Stephen Vincent Benet
Nothing was gone, nothing was changed,
The smallest wave was unestranged
By all the long ache of the years
Since last I saw them, blind with tears.
Their welcome like the hills stood fast:
And I, I had come home at last.
A Terre
© Wilfred Owen
Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell,
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me -- brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.
The Final Tax
© Ellis Parker Butler
Said Statesman A to Statesman Z:
What can we tax that is not paying?
Were taxing every blessed thing
Heres what our people are defraying:
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-lairenil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumusthe gondola
stopped, the old palace was there, how charming its grey and pinkgoats and
monkeys, with such hair too!so the countess passed on until she came through the
little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.
Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
(The Dry Salvagespresumably les trois sauvagesis a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Yet the dead youth must go on alone.
In silence the elder Lament brings him
as far as the gorge where it shimmers in the moonlight:
The Foutainhead of Joy. With reverance she names it,
saying: "In the world of mankind it is a life-bearing stream."
from The Tenth Elegy
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Ah, but the City of Pain: how strange its streets are:
the false silence of sound drowning sound,
and there--proud, brazen, effluence from the mold of emptiness--
the gilded hubbub, the bursting monument.
M'Fingal - Canto IV
© John Trumbull
"For me, before that fatal time,
I mean to fly th' accursed clime,
And follow omens, which of late
Have warn'd me of impending fate.
FOREWARD, is 5
© Edward Estlin Cummings
F O R E W A R DOn the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original
or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an intro-
duction to this book.
At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from
suppose... (VIII)
© Edward Estlin Cummings
young death sits in a cafe
smiling, a pierce of money held between
his thumb and first finger
Dharma
© Billy Collins
Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?
The Sompnour's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
1. Carrack: A great ship of burden used by the Portuguese; the
name is from the Italian, "cargare," to load
