War poems
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The Man Against the Sky
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Between me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
Lancelot
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Gawaine, aware again of Lancelot
In the Kings garden, coughed and followed him;
Whereat he turned and stood with folded arms
And weary-waiting eyes, cold and half-closed
Discovery
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Assured somehow that he would make us wise,
Our pleasure was to wait; and our surprise
Was hard when we confessed the dry return
Of his regret. For we were still to learn
That earth has not a school where we may go
For wisdom, or for more than we may know.
An Island
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Take it away, and swallow it yourself.
Ha! Look you, theres a rat.
Last night there were a dozen on that shelf,
And two of them were living in my hat.
Cassandra
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
I heard one who said: "Verily,
What word have I for children here?
Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.
The Dark Hills
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Lost Anchors
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Improving a dry leiure to invest
Their misadventure with a manifest
Analogy that he may read who runs,
The sailor made it old as ocean grass--
Telling of much that once had come to pass
With him, whose mother should have had no sons.
Calverly's
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
We go no more to Calverly's,
For there the lights are few and low;
And who are there to see by them,
Or what they see, we do not know.
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass's head in Fairyland
As he would add a shilling to more shillings,
Octaves
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
I We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel --
The Field of Glory
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
War shook the land where Levi dwelt,
And fired the dismal wrath he felt,
That such a doom was ever wrought
As his, to toil while others fought;
The Mill
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
The miller's wife had waited long,
The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
And there might yet be nothing wrong
In how he went and what he said:
Miniver Cheevy
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Mr Flood's Party
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
The Deserted Village
© Oliver Goldsmith
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.
Elizabeth
© Michael Ondaatje
In the pond where they kept the goldfish
Philip and I broke the ice with spades
and tried to spear the fishes;
we killed one and Philip ate it,
then he kissed me
with the raw saltless fish in his mouth.
Bearhug
© Michael Ondaatje
Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.
The Vine & Oak, A Fable
© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.
He saw her all defenseless lay
To each invading beast a prey,
And wish'd to clasp her in his arms
And bear her far away from harms.
'Twas love -- 'twas tenderness -- 'twas all
That men the tender passion call.
The Procession
© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.
The legislators pass along
A solemn, self-important throng!
Just raised from the common mass,
They feel themselves another class.
--But let them in the sunshine play
For every dog must have his day.
