Teacher poems
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Cautionary Tales by Mark Vinz : American Life in Poetry #229 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
For over forty years, Mark Vinz, of Moorhead, Minnesota-poet, teacher, publisher-has been a prominent advocate for the literature of the Upper Great Plains. Here’s a recent poem that speaks to growing older.
Cautionary Tales
Beyond the field of grazing, gazing cows
Hard Knocks
© Edgar Albert Guest
I'm not the man to say that failure's sweet,
Nor tell a chap to laugh when things go wrong;
Willie's Question
© George MacDonald
I.
Willie speaks.
Is it wrong, the wish to be great,
For I do wish it so?
I have asked already my sister Kate;
She says she does not know.
The School-Boy
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
So ran my lines, as pen and paper met,
The truant goose-quill travelling like Planchette;
Too ready servant, whose deceitful ways
Full many a slipshod line, alas! betrays;
Hence of the rhyming thousand not a few
Have builded worse--a great deal--than they knew.
The Shadowy Waters: The Shadowy Waters
© William Butler Yeats
Second Sailor. And I had thought to make
A good round Sum upon this cruise, and turn
For I am getting on in lifeto something
That has less ups and downs than robbery.
The Negro Schools
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
Please be silent now, my country, while I fill the speaker's place;
While I point out some abuses that we constantly embrace,
Listen with your best attention to the words that I shall say,
How the Negro schools are managed, in this Commonwealth today.
Ashtaroth: A Dramatic Lyric
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Orion: But an understanding tacit.
You have prospered much since the day we met;
You were then a landless knight;
You now have honour and wealth, and yet
I never can serve you right.
Tirocinium; or, a Review of Schools
© William Cowper
It is not from his form, in which we trace
Strength join'd with beauty, dignity with grace,
The Borough. Letter IV: Sects And Professions In Religion
© George Crabbe
"SECTS in Religion?"--Yes of every race
We nurse some portion in our favour'd place;
Three Teachers
© Lesbia Harford
Sometimes I can see
When I teach
Half my children talk
Each to each.
The Teacher Of Wisdom
© Oscar Wilde
From his childhood he had been as one filled with the perfect
knowledge of God, and even while he was yet but a lad many of the
saints, as well as certain holy women who dwelt in the free city of
his birth, had been stirred to much wonder by the grave wisdom of
his answers.
An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum
© Stephen Spender
Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.
The Ring And The Book - Chapter X - The Pope
© Robert Browning
Then Stephen, Pope and seventh of the name,
Cried out, in synod as he sat in state,
While choler quivered on his brow and beard,
Come into court, Formosus, thou lost wretch,
That claimedst to be late the Pope as I!
An Essay on Man: Epistle 1
© Alexander Pope
To Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke
Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
Parker Cleveland. Written On Revisiting Brunswick In The Summer of 1875
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Among the many lives that I have known,
None I remember more serene and sweet,
To My Old Schoolmaster
© John Greenleaf Whittier
AN EPISTLE NOT AFTER THE MANNER OF HORACE
Old friend, kind friend! lightly down
An Inventor
© Augusta Davies Webster
I thought this time 'twas done at last,
the workings perfected, the life in it;
and there's the flaw again, the petty flaw,
the fretting small impossibility
that has to be made possible.
Purgatorio (English)
© Dante Alighieri
To run o'er better waters hoists its sail
The little vessel of my genius now,
That leaves behind itself a sea so cruel;
