HOSTILE POEMS

Grace Darling

Among the dwellers in the silent fields
The natural heart is touched, and public way
And crowded street resound with ballad strains,
Inspired by one whose very name bespeaks
.....

William Wordsworth

If We But Knew

If we but knew the weary way,
The poisoned paths of hostile hate,
The roughened roads of fiercest fate,
Through which our brother's journey lay,
.....

Freeman E. Miller

Justified

The truth sang melodiously to my open deaf ears,
But I stiffened, to the grunts of my repellent pride,
In tunes of ignorance I danced, but in penitential tears,
The truth sang melodiously to my open deaf ears,
.....

Chibueze Osukwu

The Female Exile

Written at Brighthelmstone in Nov. 1792.
NOVEMBER'S chill blast on the rough beach is howling,
The surge breaks afar, and then foams to the shore,
Dark clouds o'er the sea gather heavy and scowling,
.....

Charlotte Smith

Elegy Xix. - Written In Spring, 1743

Again the labouring hind inverts the soil;
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave;
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
And finds me vacant in the rural cave.
.....

William Shenstone

Absalom And Achitophel

In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multipli'd his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd:
.....

John Dryden

Masks

These tales of old disguisings, are they not
Strange myths of souls that found themselves among
Unwonted folk that spake an hostile tongue,
Some soul from all the rest who'd not forgot
.....

Ezra Pound

An Ode On The Popular Superstitions Of The Highlands Of Scotland, Considered As The Subject Of Poetr

Home, thou return'st from Thames, whose naiads long
Have seen thee ling'ring with a fond delay
'Mid those soft friends, whose hearts, some future day,
Shall melt, perhaps, to hear thy tragic song.
.....

William Collins

The Suicide

Bereft of soul
My body shall be bare.
Bereft of body
My soul shall be bare.
.....

Kamala Das

Incommunicado

The groundhog on the mountain did not run
But fatly scuttled into the splayed fern
And faced me, back to a ledge of dirt, to rattle
Her sallow rodent teeth like castanets
.....

Sylvia Plath

Scenes

Observe ye not yon high cliff's brow,
Up which a wanderer clambers slow,
‘T is by a hoary ruin crown'd,
Which rocks when shrill winds whistle round;
.....

George Borrow

A Song Inscribed To The Fremont Clubs

BENEATH thy skies, November!
Thy skies of cloud and rain,
Around our blazing camp-fires
We close our ranks again.
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

Home, Sweet Home

Sharers of a common country,
They had met in deadly strife;
Men who should have been as brothers
Madly sought each other's life.
.....

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Journey Of The Magi

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
.....

T. S. Eliot

The Odyssey: Book 08

Now when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared,
Alcinous and Ulysses both rose, and Alcinous led the way to the
Phaecian place of assembly, which was near the ships. When they got
there they sat down side by side on a seat of polished stone, while
.....

Homer

Francis Ii, King Of Naples

Written after reading Trevelyan's “Garibaldi and the making of Italy”


Poor foolish monarch, vacillating, vain,
.....

Amy Lowell

The Inverted Torch

Threading a darksome passage all alone,
The taper's flame, by envious current blown,
Crouched low, and eddied round, as in affright,
So challenged by the vast and hostile night,
.....

Edith M. Thomas

Translation (whilst Zephyr Sooths The Angry Waves)

Whilst zephyr sooths the angry waves
Of Ocean into rest,
Each vessel is in safety borne,
And every pilot blest.
.....

Matilda Betham

Gettysburg: A Battle Ode

I

Victors, living, with laureled brow,
And you that sleep beneath the sward!
.....

George Parsons Lathrop

The Delibash

With the hostile camp in skirmish
Our men once were changing shot,
Pranced the Delibash his charger
'Fore our ranks of Cossacks hot.
.....

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

On The Lighthouse At Antibes

A stormy light of sunset glows and glares
Between two banks of cloud, and o'er the brine
Thy fair lamp on the sky's carnation line
Alone on the lone promontory flares:
.....

Mathilde Blind

Pauline Part I

To the memory of my devoted wife dead and gone yet always with me I dedicate

PAULINE

.....

Hanford Lennox Gordon

Sheridan

Embalm'd in fame, and sacred from decay,
What mighty name, in arms, in arts, or verse,
From England claims this consecrated day.
Her nobles crowding round the shadowy hearse?
.....

Thomas Gent

A Strong City

For them that hope in Thee…. Thou shalt hide
them in the secret of Thy face, from the disturbance of men.

Thou shalt protect them in Thy tabernacle from the
.....

George Parsons Lathrop

A Meditation

How often in the years that close,
When truce had stilled the sieging gun,
The soldiers, mounting on their works,
With mutual curious glance have run
.....

Herman Melville

The Explorer

"There's no sense in going further --
it's the edge of cultivation,"
So they said, and I believed it --
broke my land and sowed my crop --
.....

Rudyard Kipling

The People

I recall that man and not two centuries
have passed since I saw him,
he went neither by horse nor by carriage:
purely on foot
.....

Pablo Neruda

Flora

REMOTE from scenes, where the o'erwearied mind
Shrinks from the crimes and follies of mankind,
From hostile menace, and offensive boast,
Peace, and her train of home-born pleasures lost;
.....

Charlotte Smith

Peruvian Tales: Alzira, Tale I

Description of Peru, and of its Productions--Virtues of the People;
and of their Monarch, ATALIBA --His love for ALZIRA --Their Nup-
tials celebrated--Character of ZORAI , her Father--Descent of the
Genius of Peru--Prediction of the Fall of that Empire.
.....

Helen Maria Williams

Epilogue

Oh ! les heures du soir sous ces climats légers,
La lumière en est belle et la lune y est douce,
Et l'ombre souple et claire y répand sur les mousses
Les mobiles dessins d'un feuillage étranger.
.....

Emile Verhaeren

Ordained

1.

THROUGH jewelled windows in the walls
The tempered daylight smiles,
.....

Ada Cambridge

Couplets

I am for Cutting. I'm a blade
Designed for use at dress parade.
My gleaming length, when I display
Peace rules the land with gentle sway;
.....

Ambrose Bierce

The Dream Of Man

To the eye and the ear of the Dreamer
This Dream out of darkness flew,
Through the horn or the ivory portal,
But he wist not which of the two.
.....

William Watson

Habakkuk

Now leave the Porch, to vision now retreat,
Where the next rapture glows with varying heat;
Now change the time, and change the Temple scene,
The following Seer forewarns a future reign.
.....

Thomas Parnell

Walcheren Expedition

Ye brave, enduring Englishmen,
Who dash through fire and flood,
And spend with equal thoughtlessness
Your money and your blood,
.....

James Henry Leigh Hunt

Fragment

Descriptive of the miseries of War; from a Poem
called 'The Emigrants,' printed in 1793.
TO a wild mountain, whose bare summit hides
Its broken eminence in clouds; whose steeps
.....

Charlotte Smith

Ode--

I.
Our city by the sea,
As the rebel city known,
With a soul and spirit free
.....

William Gilmore Simms

Ode--shell The Old City! Shell!

I.
Shell the old city I shell!
Ye myrmidons of Hell;
Ye serve your master well,
.....

William Gilmore Simms

Tale Xv

ADVICE; OR THE 'SQUIRE AND THE PRIEST.

A wealthy Lord of far-extended land
Had all that pleased him placed at his command;
.....

George Crabbe

To A Lady

Spare, gen'rous victor, spare the slave,
Who did unequal war pursue;
That more than triumph he might have,
In being overcome by you.
.....

Matthew Prior

The Young Rat And His Dam, The Cock And The Cat

No Cautions of a Matron, Old and Sage,
Young Rattlehead to Prudence cou'd engage;
But forth the Offspring of her Bed wou'd go,
Nor reason gave, but that he wou'd do so.
.....

Anne Kingsmill Finch

Man's Injustice Towards Providence

A Thriving Merchant, who no Loss sustained,
In little time a mighty Fortune gain'd.
No Pyrate seiz'd his still returning Freight;
Nor foundring Vessel sunk with its own Weight:
.....

Anne Kingsmill Finch

Banner Of Men Who Were Free

Flag of the great republic, banner of men who were free!
Carried aloft for freedom in many a bloody gorge;
Torn by the shot of tyrants in battle by land and sea,
The rallying hope of our fathers by Valley Forge.
.....

Edgar Lee Masters

Elegy On Newstead Abbey

'It is the voice of years that are gone!
they roll before me with all their deeds.'~OSSIAN


.....

George Gordon Byron

The Battle Of The Nile

Shout! for the Lord hath triumphed gloriously!
Upon the shores of that renowned land,
Where erst His mighty arm and outstretched hand
He lifted high,
.....

William Lisle Bowles

Love And Honor

Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra
Nec pulcher Ganges, atque auro turbidus Haemus,
Laudibus Angligenum certent; non Bactra, nec Indi,
Totaque thuriferis Panchaia pinguis arenis.
.....

William Shenstone

Palinodia

TO THE MARQUIS GINO CAPPONI.


I was mistaken, my dear Gino. Long
.....

Count Giacomo Leopardi

Charleston

Calm as that second summer which precedes
The first fall of the snow,
In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds,
The City bides the foe.
.....

Henry Timrod

Ode To Napoleon Buonaparte

'Expends Annibalem:--quot libras in duce summo
Invenies?~JUVENAL., Sat. X.

I.
.....

George Gordon Byron

The Stag.

Blest be the boy, by virtue nurst,
Who knows not aught of fear's controul,
And keeps, in peril's sudden burst,
The freedom of an active soul.
.....

William Hayley