CONTEMPORARY POEMS

Books Written On The Road

ocean wave moving across sail crape rays
sun glimmering sea rail sunset, campfire
beach street revolutionary figures, walk
taken along the sand, somewhere between
.....

Joseph Mayo Wristen

On The Way

(Philadelphia, 1794)

Note.- The following imaginary dialogue between
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, which is not based upon
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Sunt Leones

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena
By indulging native appetites played was now been seen a
Not entirely negligible part
In consolidating at the very start
.....

Stevie Smith

Poems - The New Edition - Preface

In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.

I have, in the present collection, omitted the Poem from which the volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus, having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared; the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.

.....

Matthew Arnold

The Mutability Of Literature - A Colloquy In Westminster Abbey - Prose

I know that all beneath the moon decays,
And what by mortals in this world is brought,
In time's great periods shall return to nought.
I know that all the muses' heavenly rays,
.....

Washington Irving

Philip Of Pokanoket - An Indian Memoir - Prose

As monumental bronze unchanged his look:
A soul that pity touch'd, but never shook;
Train'd from his tree-rock'd cradle to his bier,
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
.....

Washington Irving

To A Contemporary Bunkshooter

You come along… tearing your shirt… yelling about Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
.....

Carl Sandburg

John Hancock Otis

As to democracy, fellow citizens,
Are you not prepared to admit
That I, who inherited riches and was to the manner born,
Was second to none in Spoon River
.....

Edgar Lee Masters

To A Noisy Contemporary

Your egoâ??s bad dream drums that vision
Encountered on page one, pages three to eighty-nine.
Count the wound-up places where we went aground.
As an entertainment, zero. Hero horror. Try the line
.....

Weldon Kees

Great Serenity: Questions And Answers

People in a hall thatâ??s lit so brightly
It hurts
Spoke of religion
In the lives of contemporary people
.....

Yehuda Amichai

Eureka - A Prose Poem (an Essay On The Material And Spiritual Universe)

It is with humility really unassumed, it is with a sentiment even of awe, that I pen the opening sentence of this work: for of all conceivable subjects I approach the reader with the most solemn, the most comprehensive, the most difficult, the most august.

What terms shall I find sufficiently simple in their sublimity -- sufficiently sublime in their simplicity, for the mere enunciation of my theme?

.....

Edgar Allan Poe

A Royal Poet - Prose

Though your body be confined
And soft love a prisoner bound,
Yet the beauty of your mind
Neither check nor chain hath found.
.....

Washington Irving

In A Yellow Frame

Her hand tinted to gold with henna
Gave me a cup of wine like gold water,
And I said: The moon rise, the sun rise.

.....

Edward Powys Mathers (as Translator)

For You, Mother

I have a dream for you, Mother,
Like a soft thick fringe to hide your eyes.
I have a surprise for you, Mother,
Shaped like a strange butterfly.
.....

Hilda Conkling

So Far And So Far, And On Toward The End

SO far, and so far, and on toward the end,
Singing what is sung in this book, from the irresistible impulses of
me;
But whether I continue beyond this book, to maturity,
.....

Walt Whitman

Hongree And Mahry

The sun was setting in its wonted west,
When HONGREE, Sub-Lieutenant of Chassoores,
Met MAHRY DAUBIGNY, the Village Rose,
Under the Wizard's Oak - old trysting-place
.....

William Schwenck Gilbert

Starting From Paumanok

STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;
Dweller in Mannahatta, my city--or on
.....

Walt Whitman

How It Strikes A Contemporary

I only knew one poet in my life:
And this, or something like it, was his way.

You saw go up and down Valladolid,
.....

Robert Browning

To The Memory Of Walter Savage Landor

I NOW DEDICATE, WITH EQUAL AFFECTION, REVERENCE, AND REGRET, A POEM
INSCRIBED TO HIM WHILE YET ALIVE IN WORDS WHICH ARE NOW RETAINED
BECAUSE THEY WERE LAID BEFORE HIM; AND TO WHICH, RATHER THAN CANCEL
THEM, I HAVE ADDED SUCH OTHERS AS WERE EVOKED BY THE NEWS OF HIS DEATH:
.....

Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Nutbrown Maid

The Text is from Arnold's Chronicle, of the edition which, from typographical evidence, is said to have been printed at Antwerp in 1502 by John Doesborowe. Each stanza is there printed in six long lines. Considerable variations appear in later editions. There is also a Balliol MS. (354), which contains a contemporary version, and the Percy Folio contains a corrupt version.

This should not be considered as a ballad proper; it is rather a 'dramatic lyric.' Its history, however, is quite as curious as that of many ballads. It occurs, as stated above, in the farrago known as the Chronicle of Richard Arnold, inserted between a list of the 'tolls' due on merchandise entering or leaving the port of Antwerp, and a table giving Flemish weights and moneys in terms of the corresponding English measures. Why such a poem should be printed in such incongruous surroundings, what its date or who its author was, are questions impossible to determine. Its position here is perhaps almost as incongruous as in its original place.

.....

Frank Sidgwick

Life In An Indian Village

BY T. RAMAKRISHNA, B.A.


With an Introduction by the Right Hon. Sir M.E. GRANT DUFF, G.C.S.I.
.....

Ramakrishna, T.

Because The Good Are Never Fair

When she appears the daylight envies her garment,
The wanton daylight envies her garment
To show it to the jealous sun.

.....

Edward Powys Mathers (as Translator)

Adversaries

He held his hands like plastic -
his vestments the finer
calling of his trade,
vocation as modern strummer
.....

Paul Cameron Brown

Ocean Is My Name

Coming from somewhere as I stepped into this world, it gave
me a name unasked. From then on, all the steps I have made carrying
the weight of all my pleasures and pains are the faltering steps in
quest of an expression – a journey of mine to find a name for
.....

Seshendra Sharma

Awaken Talker

The leaver and shaft move counter clock wise
the variety of souls when will you see is damage
control abuse for our land in African pride

.....

Plantard Dacull

All The World's A Stage

All the world is a stage
Crowded by players of every age.
And the big broad sun is a spotlight,
And one man is the playwright.
.....

Khayelihle Bongiswa Gamedze

The Assignation (pons Asinorum)

Many devils are in woods, in waters, in wilderness and in dark,
pooly places ready to hurt. . . people, some are also in thick,
black clouds. ? Martin Luther

.....

Paul Cameron Brown

A Haiku's Tale

Contemporary,
grasses fortunes and a turn,
did a seed conquer?.

.....

Bamanga Bashir

The Cat And The Two Sparrows

[1]

To Monseigneur The Duke De Bourgogne.

.....

Jean De La Fontaine

Hongree And Mahry. A Recollection Of A Surrey Melodrama.

The sun was setting in its wonted west,
When Hongree, Sub-Lieutenant of Chassoores,
Met Mahry Daubigny, the Village Rose,
Under the Wizard's Oak old trysting-place
.....

William Schwenck Gilbert

Extraordinary

My friends wonder where
he started this amazing drawing.
I was inherently a baggy
when he started making my sketch,
.....

Gabriel Orji

Copy Of The Birth-day Verses

ON MR. FORD[1]


Come, be content, since out it must,
.....

Jonathan Swift

Part Of Seeds

Movement that's equivalent to the stars acknowledged to
saints uplifted to those sign pale and violent in secondary
Souls contacted our families uplifted a personality
we have created a platforms and a playground
.....

Plantard Dacull

Captain Car

The Text is from a Cottonian MS. of the sixteenth century in the British Museum (Vesp. A. xxv. fol. 178). It is carelessly written, and words are here and there deleted and altered. I have allowed myself the liberty of choosing readings from several alternatives or possibilities.


The Story.--There seems to be no doubt that this ballad is founded upon an historical incident of 1571. The Scottish variants are mostly called Edom o' Gordon, i.e. Adam Gordon, who was brother to George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. Adam was a bold soldier; and, his clan being at variance with the Forbeses--on religious grounds,--he encountered them twice in the autumn of 1571, and inflicted severe defeat on them at the battles of Tuiliangus and Crabstane. In November he approached the castle of Towie, a stronghold of the Forbes clan; but the lady occupying it obstinately refused to yield it up, and it was burnt to the ground.
.....

Frank Sidgwick

To The Poet Laureate

My dear Poet Laureate, -
Do not, I implore you,
Be perturbed.
It is not my purpose to harp
.....

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland

Inferior Introvert

The introverted souls in strivings
As our intuition do always portrays
Which is the enigmatic truths
Verily none can be able to conceive
.....

Abdulyekeen Taoheed

A Dialogue To The Memory Of Mr. Alexander Pope

"Non injussa cano."
Virg.


.....

Henry Austin Dobson

Sir Hugh, Or The Jew's Daughter

The Text is given from Jamieson's Popular Ballads, as taken down by him from Mrs. Brown's recitation.


The Story of the ballad is told at length in at least two ancient monastic records; in the Annals of the Monastery of Waverley, the first Cistercian house in England, near Farnham, Surrey (edited by Luard, vol. ii. p. 346, etc., from MS. Cotton Vesp, A. xvi. fol. 150, etc.); more fully in the Annals of the Monastery at Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire (edited by Luard, vol. i. pp. 340, etc., from MS. Cotton Vesp. E. iii. fol. 53, etc.). Both of these give the date as 1255, the latter adding July 31. Matthew Paris also tells the tale as a contemporary event. The details may be condensed as follows.
.....

Frank Sidgwick