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Hod Putt
Here I lie close to the grave Of Old Bill Piersol, Who grew rich trading with the Indians, and who Afterwards took the Bankrupt Law And emerged from it richer than ever Myself grown tired of toil and poverty And beholding how Old Bill and other grew in wealth Robbed a traveler one Night near Proctor's Grove, Killing him unwittingly while doing so, For which I was tried and hanged. That was my way of going into bankruptcy. Now we who took the bankrupt law in our respective ways Sleep peacefully side by side.
Edgar Lee Masters
To Laura In Death. Sonnet XV.
Discolorato hai, Morte, il più bel volto.HER PRESENCE IN VISIONS IS HIS ONLY CONSOLATION. Death, thou of fairest face hast 'reft the hue,And quench'd in deep thick night the brightest eyes,And loosed from all its tenderest, closest tiesA spirit to faith and ardent virtue true.In one short hour to all my bliss adieu!Hush'd are those accents worthy of the skies,Unearthly sounds, whose loss awakes my sighs;And all I hear is grief, and all I view.Yet oft, to soothe this lone and anguish'd heart,By pity led, she comes my couch to seek,Nor find I other solace here below:And if her thrilling tones my strain could speakAnd look divine, with Love's enkindling dartNot man's sad breast alone, but fiercest beasts should glow.
Francesco Petrarca
Indian Summer
The old grey year is near his term in sooth,And now with backward eye and soft-laid palmAwakens to a golden dream of youth,A second childhood lovely and most calm,And the smooth hour about his misty headAn awning of enchanted splendour weaves,Of maples, amber, purple and rose-red,And droop-limbed elms down-dropping golden leaves.With still half-fallen lids he sits and dreamsFar in a hollow of the sunlit wood,Lulled by the murmur of thin-threading streams,Nor sees the polar armies overfloodThe darkening barriers of the hills, nor hearsThe north-wind ringing with a thousand spears.
Archibald Lampman
The Wonder Maker
Come, if thou'rt cold to Summer's charms,Her clouds of green, her starry flowers,And let this bird, this wandering bird,Make his fine wonder yours;He, hiding in the leaves so green,When sampling this fair world of ours,Cries cuckoo, clear; and like Lot's wife,I look, though it should cost my life.When I can hear that charmed one's voice,I taste of immortality;My joy's so great that on my heartDoth lie eternity,As light as any little flower,So strong a wonder works in me;Cuckoo! he cries, and fills my soulWith all that's rich and beautiful.
William Henry Davies
Autumn Sunshine
The sun sets out the autumn crocuses And fills them up a pouring measure Of death-producing wine, till treasureRuns waste down their chalices.All, all Persephone's pale cups of mould Are on the board, are over-filled; The portion to the gods is spilled;Now, mortals all, take hold!The time is now, the wine-cup full and full Of lambent heaven, a pledging-cup; Let now all mortal men take upThe drink, and a long, strong pull.Out of the hell-queen's cup, the heaven's pale wine - Drink then, invisible heroes, drink. Lips to the vessels, never shrink,Throats to the heavens incline.And take within the wine the god's great oath By heaven and earth and hellish stream To break this sick and...
David Herbert Richards Lawrence
The Death Of The Old Year
Full knee-deep lies the winter snow,And the winter winds are wearily sighing:Toll ye the church bell sad and slow,And tread softly and speak low,For the old year lies a-dying.Old year you must not die;You came to us so readily,You lived with us so steadily,Old year you shall not die.He lieth still: he doth not move:He will not see the dawn of day.He hath no other life above.He gave me a friend and a true trueloveAnd the New-year will take 'em away.Old year you must not go;So long you have been with us,Such joy as you have seen with us,Old year, you shall not go.He froth'd his bumpers to the brim;A jollier year we shall not see.But tho' his eyes are waxing dim,And tho' his foes speak ill of him,He ...
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Call Not The Royal Swede Unfortunate
Call not the royal Swede unfortunate,Who never did to Fortune bend the knee;Who slighted fear; rejected steadfastlyTemptation; and whose kingly name and stateHave "perished by his choice, and not his fate!"Hence lives He, to his inner self endeared;And hence, wherever virtue is revered,He sits a more exalted Potentate,Throned in the hearts of men. Should Heaven ordainThat this great Servant of a righteous causeMust still have sad or vexing thoughts to endure,Yet may a sympathising spirit pause,Admonished by these truths, and quench all painIn thankful joy and gratulation pure.
William Wordsworth
Aedh Tells Of The Rose In His Heart
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,With the earth and the sky and the water, remade, like a casket of goldFor my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
William Butler Yeats
Unrest
In the youth of the year, when the birds were building, When the green was showing on tree and hedge,And the tenderest light of all lights was gilding The world from zenith to outermost edge,My soul grew sad and longingly lonely! I sighed for the season of sun and rose,And I said, "In the Summer and that time only Lies sweet contentment and blest repose."With bee and bird for her maids of honour Came Princess Summer in robes of green.And the King of day smiled down upon her And wooed her, and won her, and made her queen.Fruit of their union and true love's pledges, Beautiful roses bloomed day by day,And rambled in gardens and hid in hedges Like royal children in sportive play.My restless soul for a little sea...
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Ode On Intimations Of Immortality
From Recollections of Early ChildhoodThe Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety.IThere was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,The earth, and every common sight,To me did seemApparelled in celestial light,The glory and the freshness of a dream.It is not now as it hath been of yore;Turn wheresoe'er I may,By night or day,The things which I have seen I now can see no more.IIThe Rainbow comes and goes,And lovely is the Rose,The Moon doth with delightLook round her when the heavens are bare;Waters on a starry nightAre beautiful and fair;The sunshine is a glorious birth;But yet I know, where'er I go,That there ha...
The Road
The road is thronged with women; soldiers passAnd halt, but never see them; yet they're here -A patient crowd along the sodden grass,Silent, worn out with waiting, sick with fear.The road goes crawling up a long hillside,All ruts and stones and sludge, and the emptied dregsOf battle thrown in heaps. Here where they diedAre stretched big-bellied horses with stiff legs;And dead men, bloody-fingered from the fight,Stare up at caverned darkness winking white.You in the bomb-scorched kilt, poor sprawling Jock,You tottered here and fell, and stumbled on,Half dazed for want of sleep. No dream could mockYour reeling brain with comforts lost and gone.You did not feel her arms about your knees,Her blind caress, her lips upon your head:Too tired for...
Siegfried Sassoon
An Evening Revery. - From An Unfinished Poem.
The summer day is closed, the sun is set:Well they have done their office, those bright hours,The latest of whose train goes softly outIn the red West. The green blade of the groundHas risen, and herds have cropped it; the young twigHas spread its plaited tissues to the sun;Flowers of the garden and the waste have blownAnd withered; seeds have fallen upon the soil,From bursting cells, and in their graves awaitTheir resurrection. Insects from the poolsHave filled the air awhile with humming wings,That now are still for ever; painted mothsHave wandered the blue sky, and died again;The mother-bird hath broken for her broodTheir prison shell, or shoved them from the nest,Plumed for their earliest flight. In bright alcoves,In woodland cottages with ...
William Cullen Bryant
Sonnet XX.
When in the widening circle of rebirthTo a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,And try again the unremembered earthWith the old sadness for the immortal home,Shall I revisit these same differing fieldsAnd cull the old new flowers with the same sense,That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields,Of more age than my days in this pretence?Shall I again regret strange faces lostOf which the present memory is forgotAnd but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossedOut of the closed sea and black night of Thought? Were thy face one, what sweetness will't not be, Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
The Fall Of The Year
The Autumn's come again,And the clouds descend in rain,And the leaves are fast falling in the wood;The Summer's voice is still,Save the clacking of the millAnd the lowly-muttered thunder of the flood.There's nothing in the meadBut the river's muddy speed,And the willow leaves all littered by its side.Sweet voices are all stillIn the vale and on the hill,And the Summer's blooms are withered in their pride.Fled is the cuckoo's noteTo countries far remote,And the nightingale is vanished from the woods;If you search the lordship roundThere is not a blossom found,And where the hay-cock scented is the flood.My true love's fled awaySince we walked 'mid cocks of hay,On the Sabbath in the Summer of the year;
John Clare
Preludes
IThere is no rhyme that is half so sweetAs the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;There is no metre that's half so fineAs the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;And the loveliest lyric I ever heardWas the wildwood strain of a forest bird. -If the wind and the brook and the bird would teachMy heart their beautiful parts of speech,And the natural art that they say these with,My soul would sing of beauty and mythIn a rhyme and metre that none beforeHave sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore,And the world would be richer one poet the more.IIA thought to lift me up to thoseSweet wildflowers of the pensive woods;The lofty, lowly attitudesOf bluet and of bramble-rose:To lift me where my mind may reach<...
Madison Julius Cawein
Rosie Roberts
I was sick, but more than that, I was mad At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life. So I wrote to the Chief of Police at Peoria: "l am here in my girlhood home in Spoon River, Gradually wasting away. But come and take me, I killed the son Of the merchant prince, in Madam Lou's And the papers that said he killed himself In his home while cleaning a hunting gun - Lied like the devil to hush up scandal For the bribe of advertising. In my room I shot him, at Madam Lou's, Because he knocked me down when I said That, in spite of all the money he had, I'd see my lover that night."
To ------
With a copy of Woolman's journal.Maiden! with the fair brown tressesShading o'er thy dreamy eye,Floating on thy thoughtful foreheadCloud wreaths of its sky.Youthful years and maiden beauty,Joy with them should still abide,Instinct take the place of Duty,Love, not Reason, guide.Ever in the New rejoicing,Kindly beckoning back the Old,Turning, with the gift of Midas,All things into gold.And the passing shades of sadnessWearing even a welcome guise,As, when some bright lake lies openTo the sunny skies,Every wing of bird above it,Every light cloud floating on,Glitters like that flashing mirrorIn the self-same sun.But upon thy youthful foreheadSomething like a ...
John Greenleaf Whittier
The Poor Ghost
'Oh whence do you come, my dear friend, to me,With your golden hair all fallen below your knee,And your face as white as snowdrops on the lea,And your voice as hollow as the hollow sea?''From the other world I come back to you,My locks are uncurled with dripping drenching dew.You know the old, whilst I know the new:But to-morrow you shall know this too.''Oh not to-morrow into the dark, I pray;Oh not to-morrow, too soon to go away:Here I feel warm and well-content and gay:Give me another year, another day.''Am I so changed in a day and a nightThat mine own only love shrinks from me with fright,Is fain to turn away to left or rightAnd cover up his eyes from the sight?''Indeed I loved you, my chosen friend,I loved you...
Christina Georgina Rossetti