CULTURE POEMS

How Many Times

How many times?

How many times does it get before it start to count?
He said it was needed just so she can fall in line
.....

Ademijuwon Adebagbo

Nigeria, My Country

Nigeria my country
Where milk and honey flow
Blessed with greener pasture
Nigeria my country
.....

Adetunbi Maxwell

Cultural Exchange

In the Quarter of the Negroes
Where the doors are doors of paper
Dust of dingy atoms
Blows a scratchy sound.
.....

Langston Hughes

Value Of Literature

Value of literature is above precious ruby,
It voice higher than the dictation of God,
So timeless, with in-depth human undergo,
Worthy of deep cerebral feelings to deal
.....

Santosh Kumar

Young Democracy

HARK! Young Democracy from sleep
Our careless sentries raps:
A backwash from the Futureâ??s deep
Our Evilâ??s foreland laps.
.....

Bernard O'dowd

My Birthday

A dozen years since in this house what commotion,
What bustle, what stir, and what joyful ado;
Every soul in the family at my devotion,
When into the world I came twelve years ago.
.....

Charles Lamb

Taste

What, then, is taste but those internal powers,
Active and strong, and feeling alive
To each fine impulse? a discerning sense
Of decent and sublime, with quick disgust
.....

Mark Akenside

Who Needs School?

In the future, fifteen years from now,
This won't matter,
My name carved into that desk will just be a carving,
And the pot-bellied children will still be starving.
.....

Hannah Ashwin

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
.....

W. H. Auden

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 Wickedness Of Men

The beauty of the flag is been soiled with hates , and greed,
The bravery of our past heroes are been taking in vain,
Our rich and great culture is been silenced by greedy Men,
Our lands are fertile but our grains are been planted on rocks ,
.....

Josh Ehinomhen

The Gods Of Greece

Ye in the age gone by,
Who ruled the world--a world how lovely then!--
And guided still the steps of happy men
In the light leading-strings of careless joy!
.....

Friedrich Schiller

Apollo Belvedere

A-sitttin' on a cracker box an' spittin' in the stove,
I took a sudden notion that I'd kindo' like to rove;
An' so I bought a ticket, jest as easy as could be,
From Pumpkinville in Idaho to Rome in Italy;
.....

Robert Service

Art's Martyr

Telleth of a young man that fain would be fairly tattooed on his
flesh, after the heathen manner, in devices of blue, and that,
falling among the Dyacks, a folk of Borneo, was by them tattooed
in modern fashion and device, and of his misery that fell upon
.....

Andrew Lang

Irkalla's White Caves

I believe that a young woman
Is standing in a circle of lions
In the other side of the sky.

.....

Kenneth Patchen

The Secret Police

They are listening in the wires,
in the walls, under the eaves
in the wings of house martins,
in the ears of old women,
.....

Ken Smith

Culture And Cops

Five nights agone I lay at rest
On my suburban couch.
My trousers on the bedpost hung,
Red gold within their pouch.
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

Envy

This rose-tree is not made to bear
The violet blue, nor lily fair,
Nor the sweet mignonette:
And if this tree were discontent,
.....

Charles Lamb

The Devil Of Pope-fig Island

BY master Francis clearly 'tis expressed:
The folks of Papimania are blessed;
True sleep for them alone it seems was made
With US the copy only has been laid;
.....

Jean De La Fontaine

Lover's Gifts Xxii: I Shall Gladly Suffer

I shall gladly suffer the pride of culture to die out in my house,
if only in some happy future I am born a herd-boy in the Brinda
forest.
The herd-boy who grazes his cattle sitting under the banyan
.....

Rabindranath Tagore

Among The Hills

PRELUDE
ALONG the roadside, like the flowers of gold
That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,
Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod,
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

Cymru

Dim in the mist of ages, seeking a resting-place,
Broke on the shores of Britain the wave of an Aryan race.
Clear throâ?? the mist of ages, ere ever the White Christ came,
Songs of the Cymric singers have chanted the Brython fame.
.....

George Essex Evans

Welsh History

We were a people taut for war; the hills
Were no harder, the thin grass
Clothed them more warmly than the coarse
Shirts our small bones.
.....

Ronald Stuart Thomas

Vision Of Columbus - Book 2

High o'er the changing scene, as thus he gazed,
The indulgent Power his arm sublimely raised;
When round the realms superior lustre flew,
And call'd new wonders to the hero's view.
.....

Joel Barlow

Tale Xvi

THE CONFIDANT.

Anna was young and lovely--in her eye
The glance of beauty, in her cheek the dye:
.....

George Crabbe

The Giaour: A Fragment Of A Turkish Tale

No breath of air to break the wave
That rolls below the Athenian's grave,
That tomb which, gleaming o'er the cliff
First greets the homeward-veering skiff
.....

George Gordon Byron

Cadet Grey: Canto Ii

I

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

Bret Harte

At The "atlantic" Dinner

I suppose it's myself that you're making allusion to
And bringing the sense of dismay and confusion to.
Of course some must speak, - they are always selected to,
But pray what's the reason that I am expected to?
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

The World In The House

PILGRIMS who journey in the narrow way,
Should go as little cumbered as they may.
'Tis heavy sailing with a freighted ship ;
'Tis pleasant travelling with a staff and scrip.
.....

Jane Taylor

Corn

To-day the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
.....

Sidney Lanier

Obesity

With belly like a poisoned pup
Said I: 'I must give bacon up:
And also, I profanely fear,
I must abandon bread and beer
.....

Robert William Service

The Woods

I love the woods when the magic hand
Of Spring, as if sweeping the keys
Of a wornout instrument, touches the earth;
When beauty and song in the gladness of birth
.....

Hattie Howard

Cleon

"As certain also of your own poets have said"--
(Acts 17.28)
Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea
.....

Robert Browning

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

Culture

Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
.....

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Libertatis Sacra Fames

Albeit nurtured in democracy,
And liking best that state republican
Where every man is Kinglike and no man
Is crowned above his fellows, yet I see,
.....

Oscar Wilde

Ida Chicken

After I had attended lectures
At our Chautauqua, and studied French
For twenty years, committing the grammar
Almost by heart,
.....

Edgar Lee Masters

Always There Are The Children

and always there are the children

there will be children in the heat of day
there will be children in the cold of winter
.....

Nikki Giovanni

Internal Migration: On Being On Tour

As an American traveler I have
to remember not to get actionably mad
about the way things are around here.
Tomorrow Iâ??ll be a thousand miles away
.....

Alan Dugan

Glimpses.

Sounds of rural life and labour!
Not the notes of pipe and tabour,
Not the clash of helm and sabre
Bright'ning up the field of glory,
.....

Charles Sangster

I Am With Terrorism

We are accused of terrorism:
if we defended rose and woman
and the mighty verse ...
and the blueness of sky ...
.....

Nizar Qabbani

The Falmouth Bell

Never was there lovelier town
Than our Falmouth by the sea.
Tender curves of sky look down
On her grace of knoll and lea.
.....

Katharine Lee Bates

The New Locksley Hall

'Forty Years After'

COMRADE, yet a little further I would go before the night
Closes round and chills in darkness all the glorious sunset light â??
.....

Francis William Lauderdale Adams

A Grammarian's Funeral

Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe


Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
.....

Robert Browning

The Hermitage Of Agastya

Righteous Rama, soft-eyed Sita, and the gallant Lakshman stood
In the wilderness of Dandaki-trackless, pathless, boundless wood,

But within its gloomy gorges, dark and deep and known to few,
.....

Valmiki

The Halt Before Rome--september 1867

Is it so, that the sword is broken,
Our sword, that was halfway drawn?
Is it so, that the light was a spark,
That the bird we hailed as the lark
.....

Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Princess (prologue)

Sir Walter Vivian all a summer's day
Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun
Up to the people: thither flocked at noon
His tenants, wife and child, and thither half
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Giaour

A Fragment of a Turkish Tale

The tale which these disjointed fragments present, is founded upon circumstances now less common in the East than formerly; either because the ladies are more circumspect than in the 'olden time', or because the Christians have better fortune, or less enterprise. The story, when entire, contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover, at the time the Seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. The desertion of the Mainotes on being refused the plunder of Misitra, led to the abandonment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea,during which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful.

.....

George Gordon Byron

Elegy On Newstead Abbey

“It is the voice of years, that are gone! they roll before me, with
all their deeds.”

Ossian.
.....

George Gordon Lord Byron