CIVIC POEMS

Prejudice

IN yonder red-brick mansion, tight and square,
Just at the town's commencement, lives the mayor.
Some yards of shining gravel, fenced with box,
Lead to the painted portal--where one knocks :
.....

Jane Taylor

The Pied Piper Of Hamelin

A Child's Story

Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
.....

Robert Browning

No Brigadier Throughout The Year

1561

No Brigadier throughout the Year
So civic as the Jay-
.....

Emily Dickinson

Beautiful City

Beautiful city

Beautiful city, the centre and crater of European confusion,
O you with your passionate shriek for the rights of an equal
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Rhymer's Reply. Incense And Splendor

Incense and Splendor haunt me as I go.
Though my good works have been, alas, too few,
Though I do naught, High Heaven comes down to me,
And future ages pass in tall review.
.....

Vachel Lindsay

A Town

A BUSY town mid Britain's isle,
Behold in fancy's eye ;
With tower, and spire, and civic pile,
Beneath a summer sky :
.....

Jane Taylor

Cadet Grey: Canto Ii

I

Where West Point crouches, and with lifted shield
Turns the whole river eastward through the pass;
.....

Bret Harte

Ode To W. Kitchener, M.d.

Author of
The Cook's Oracle, Observations on Vocal Music, The Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life, Practical Observations on Telescopes, Opera-Glasses, and Spectacles, The Housekeeper's Ledger
and
The Pleasure of Making a Will.
.....

Thomas Hood

Brightness Breaches And The Beak

Bright young thing: Thou on the beaches
Life is gay and pleasure laden
All in vain the law beseeches
Courtesy from man and maiden
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

Lydd

For the Reunion of the Bates Family at Quincy, August 3, 1916
FAR away on the sunny levels
Where Kent lies drowsing beside the sea,
Where over the foxglove as over the foam
.....

Katharine Lee Bates

To His Noble Friend, Mr. Richard Lovelace, Upon His Poems

Sir,
Our times are much degenerate from those
Which your sweet muse with your fair fortune chose,
And as complexions alter with the climes,
.....

Andrew Marvell

A Civic Holiday Trip

Lines on a civic holiday trip on the Grand Trunk,
to Toronto, August, 1882. Address to Mr. Hodge,
conductor of Caledonian games at Ingersoll.

.....

James Mcintyre

Camperdown

The dignity of Camperdown
Is not to be denied,
Where Leura looks upon the town
And that lush countryside
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

An Epistle From Pope To Lord Bolingbroke

Confess, dear Laelius! pious, just, and wise,
Some self-content does in that bosom rise,
When you reflect, as sure you sometimes must,
What talents Heaven does to thy virtue trust,
.....

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Old Town Types No.15 - Mrs Felix Donnett

Mrs Felix Donnett was a lady of renown,
For ten years her husband was mayor of the town;
For ten years she queened it as our local social light;
And 'everything she did, my dear,' was very, very right.
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

Brother Jim

My brother Jim's a millionaire,
while I have scarce a penny;
His face is creased with lines of care,
While my mug hasn't any.
.....

Robert William Service

The Columbiad: Book Viii

The Argument


Hymn to Peace. Eulogy on the heroes slain in the war; in which the Author finds occasion to mention his Brother. Address to the patriots who have survived the conflict; exhorting them to preserve liberty they have established. The danger of losing it by inattention illustrated in the rape of the Golden Fleece. Freedom succeeding to Despotism in the moral world, like Order succeeding to Chaos in the physical world. Atlas, the guardian Genius of Africa, denounces to Hesper the crimes of his people in the slavery of the Afripans. The Author addresses his countrymen on that subject, and on the principles of their government.
.....

Joel Barlow

Dorothy Q.

GRANDMOTHER's mother: her age, I guess,
Thirteen summers, or something less;
Girlish bust, but womanly air;
Smooth, square forehead with uprolled hair;
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nature's The Same As Rome, Was Reflected In It

Nature's the same as Rome, was reflected in it.
We see images of its civic might
In the clear air, as in the sky-blue circus,
In the forum of fields, the colonnade of the grove.
.....

Osip Emilevich Mandelstam

The Poet-s Lot

WHAT is a poet's love?--
To write a girl a sonnet,
To get a ring, or some such thing,
And fustianize upon it.
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Artist And The Alderman

'Give us gardens!' said the artist,
'Blatant brick and soulless stone,
Never built a noble city.
Man lives not by bread alone,
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

Warrnambool

A civic lady, peerly proud
Of excellences that here crowd
About her trim, well-ordered streets:
The visitor she warmly greets
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

Invocation

Goddess of Liberty! O thou
Whose tearless eyes behold the chain,
And look unmoved upon the slain,
Eternal peace upon thy brow,-
.....

Ambrose Bierce

An Argument

I. THE VOICE OF THE MAN IMPATIENT WITH VISIONS AND UTOPIAS

We find your soft Utopias as white
As new-cut bread, and dull as life in cells,
.....

Vachel Lindsay

The Prelude - Book Ninth

RESIDENCE IN FRANCE

Even as a river, partly (it might seem)
Yielding to old remembrances, and swayed
.....

William Wordsworth

Pied Piper Of Hamelin, The

A CHILD'S STORY.

(_Written for, and inscribed to, W. M. the Younger._)

.....

Robert Browning

Echoes From Galilee.

What means this gathering multitude,
Upon thy shores, O, Galilee,
As various as the billows rude
That sweep thy ever restless sea?
.....

Alfred Castner King

On William Francis Bartlett

O poor Romancer thou whose printed page,
Filled with rude speech and ruder forms of strife,
Was given to heroes in whose vulgar rage
No trace appears of gentler ways and life!
.....

Bret Harte (francis)

Cadet Grey

Canto I

I

.....

Bret Harte (francis)

Elegy V. - Anno Aetates 20. - On The Approach Of Spring.

Time, never wand'ring from his annual round,
Bids Zephyr breathe the Spring, and thaw the ground;
Bleak Winter flies, new verdure clothes the plain,
And earth assumes her transient youth again.
.....

John Milton

Natura Naturans

Beside me, in the car, she sat,
She spake not, no, nor looked to me
From her to me, from me to her,
What passed so subtly, stealthily?
.....

Arthur Hugh Clough

Song - Men Of England

Men of England! who inherit
Rights that cost your sires their blood!
Men whose undegenerate spirit
Has been proved on field and flood:
.....

Thomas Campbell

A Sequel To The Foregoing

List, the winds of March are blowing;
Her ground-flowers shrink, afraid of showing
Their meek heads to the nipping air,
Which ye feel not, happy pair!
.....

William Wordsworth

On The Power Of Sound

I

Thy functions are ethereal,
As if within thee dwelt a glancing mind,
.....

William Wordsworth

Bayard Taylor

I.
'And where now, Bayard, will thy footsteps tend?'
My sister asked our guest one winter's day.
Smiling he answered in the Friends' sweet way
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Princess (the Conclusion)

So closed our tale, of which I give you all
The random scheme as wildly as it rose:
The words are mostly mine; for when we ceased
There came a minute's pause, and Walter said,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

In Memoriam A.h.h (entire Poem!!)

OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII.


Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Elegy Xxiii. Reflections Suggested By His Situation

Born near the scene for Kenelm's fate renown'd,
I take my plaintive reed, and range the grove,
And raise my lay, and bid the rocks resound
The savage force of empire, and of love.
.....

William Shenstone

Respublica

The strident high
civic trumpeting
of misrule. It is
what we stand for.
.....

Geoffrey Hill

The Charter;

ADDRESSED
TO MY NEPHEW
ATHANASE C. L. COQUEREL,
ON HIS WEDDING DAY, 1819.
.....

Helen Maria Williams

At The Funeral Of A Minor Poet

[One of the Bearers Soliloquizes:]

. . . Room in your heart for him, O Mother Earth,
Who loved each flower and leaf that made you fair,
.....

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

A Summer Summary

Shall I, lying in a grot,
Die because the day is hot?
Or declare I can't endure
Such a torrid temperature?
.....

Franklin Pierce Adams

Indian Summer

(After completing a book for one now dead)

(O Earth-and-Autumn of the Setting Sun,
She is not by, to know my task is done.)
.....

William Ellery Leonard

To Contemplation

Thee do I own, the prompter of my joys,
The soother of my cares, inspiring peace;
And I will ne'er forsake thee. Men may rave,
And blame and censure me, that I don't tie
.....

Henry Kirk White

Warning To Suffragists

(”The Latin man believes that giving woman the vote will make her less
attractive.”-Anna H. Shaw.)


.....

Alice Duer Miller

Echoes From Galilee

What means this gathering multitude,
Upon thy shores, O, Galilee,
As various as the billows rude
That sweep thy ever restless sea?
.....

Alfred Castner King

Monday In Easter Week

Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons:
but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh
righteousness, is accepted with Him. Acts x. 34, 35.

.....

John Keble

On William Francis Bartlett

O poor Romancer-thou whose printed page,
Filled with rude speech and ruder forms of strife,
Was given to heroes in whose vulgar rage
No trace appears of gentler ways and life!-
.....

Bret Harte

In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit Mdcccxxxiii: Part 113

'Tis held that sorrow makes us wise;
Yet how much wisdom sleeps with thee
Which not alone had guided me,
But served the seasons that may rise;
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson