CURRENT POEMS

The Chance Of Humming

A man
standing on two logs in a river
might do all right floating with the current
while humming in the
.....

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

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

The Trail Of Ninety-eight

Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure-Gold!
.....

Robert Service

Love's Supremacy

As yon great Sun in his supreme condition
Absorbs small worlds and makes them all his own,
So does my love absorb each vain ambition
Each outside purpose which my life has known.
.....

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

In Memory Of W.b. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
.....

W. H. Auden

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

Late, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts,
Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,

Wander'd back to living boyhood while I heard the curlews call,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Love, Hope, Desire, And Fear

...
And many there were hurt by that strong boy,
His name, they said, was Pleasure,
And near him stood, glorious beyond measure
.....

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Caged Bird

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
.....

Maya Angelou

The Future

A wanderer is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship
On the breast of the river of Time;
Brimming with wonder and joy
.....

Matthew Arnold

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
.....

William Stafford

As You Go Through Life

Don't look for the flaws as you go through life;
And even when you find them,
It is wise and kind to be somewhat blind,
And look for the virtue behind them;
.....

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Undine

Spirit of Como, whose rhythmical call
Murmurs caressingly under my wall,
Why are thy feet, though the hour be late,
Mounting the moon-silvered steps of my gate?
.....

John L. Stoddard

A Modest Request

Complied With After The Dinner At President Everett's Inauguration

Scene, - a back parlor in a certain square,
Or court, or lane, - in short, no matter where;
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Last Walk In Autumn

I.
O'er the bare woods, whose outstretched hands
Plead with the leaden heavens in vain,
I see, beyond the valley lands,
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

Endymion: Book Iii

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
.....

John Keats

A Poet!'he Hath Put His Heart To School

A poet!-He hath put his heart to school,
Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff
Which art hath lodged within his hand-must laugh
By precept only, and shed tears by rule.
.....

William Wordsworth

The Hunting Of The Snark

Dedication

Inscribed to a dear Child:
in memory of golden summer hours
.....

Lewis Carroll

The Voices Of The Death Chamber

The night lamp is faintly gleaming
Within my chamber still,
And the heavy shades of midnight
Each gloomy angle fill,
.....

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

Ruth

When Ruth was left half desolate,
Her Father took another Mate;
And Ruth, not seven years old,
A slighted child, at her own will
.....

William Wordsworth

Fall Creek

As though shedding an old skin,
Fall Creek slips free from fall's weight,
clots of leaves blackening snags,
back of pool where years ago
.....

Ron Rash

The Odyssey: Book 05

And now, as Dawn rose from her couch beside Tithonus-harbinger of
light alike to mortals and immortals-the gods met in council and with
them, Jove the lord of thunder, who is their king. Thereon Minerva
began to tell them of the many sufferings of Ulysses, for she pitied
.....

Homer

Comus

A Masque Presented At Ludlow Castle, 1634, Before

The Earl Of Bridgewater, Then President Of Wales.

.....

John Milton

Lover's Gifts Iv: She Is Near To My Heart

She is near to my heart as the meadow-flower to the earth; she is
sweet to me as sleep is to tired limbs. My love for her is my life
flowing in its fullness, like a river in autumn flood, running with
serene abandonment. My songs are one with my love, like the murmur
.....

Rabindranath Tagore

On Receipt Of My Mother's Picture

Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine-thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
.....

William Cowper

Remembering Mountain Men

I put my foot in cold water
and hold it there: early mornings
they had to wade through broken ice
to find the traps in the deep channel
.....

William Stafford

Day Sleeping Girl

Summer breeze is sporadically blowing,
Lying down the young girl slides into sleeping.
Her bamboo comb loosely attached to her hair,
Her pink bra below her waist dropped down fair.
.....

Ho Xuan Huong

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

The Heart

There is a cup of sweet or bitter drink,
Whose waters ever o'er the brim must well,
Whence flow pure thoughts of love as angels think,
Or of its dæmon depths the tongue will tell;
.....

Jones Very

Dead Leaves

DAWN

As though a gipsy maiden with dim look,
Sat crooning by the roadside of the year,
.....

James Whitcomb Riley

Adrift: A Brisbane River Reverie

An amphitheatre of purple hills
And emerald slopes where nestling villas gleam,
Flooded with golden light that crowns and fills
Height, vale, and stream.
.....

George Essex Evans

Ode On Venice

I.
Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
.....

George Gordon Byron

Answer To Tait

The mounted disk of ebonite
Has whirled before, nor whirled in vain;
Rowland of Troy, that doughty knight,
Convection currents did obtain
.....

James Clerk Maxwell

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

A free bird leaps on the back
Of the wind and floats downstream
Till the current ends and dips his wing
In the orange suns rays
.....

Maya Angelou

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

1
Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high-I see you also face
to face.
.....

Walt Whitman

A Myth

A FLOATING, a floating
Across the sleeping sea,
All night I heard a singing bird
Upon the topmast tree.
.....

Charles Kingsley

The Pupil In Magic

I AM now,--what joy to hear it!--
Of the old magician rid;
And henceforth shall ev'ry spirit
Do whate'er by me is bid;
.....

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The Medal

Of all our antic sights and pageantry
Which English idiots run in crowds to see,
The Polish Medal bears the prize alone;
A monster, more the favourite of the town
.....

John Dryden

The Odyssey: Book 07

Thus, then, did Ulysses wait and pray; but the girl drove on to
the town. When she reached her father's house she drew up at the
gateway, and her brothers-comely as the gods-gathered round her,
took the mules out of the waggon, and carried the clothes into the
.....

Homer

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

Guy Of The Temple

Down the dim West slow fails the stricken sun,
And from his hot face fades the crimson flush
Veiled in death's herald-shadows sick and gray.
Silent and dark the sombre valley lies
.....

John Hay

Ireland

Written for the Art Autograph during the Irish Famine, 1880.


Heartsome Ireland, winsome Ireland,
.....

Sidney Lanier

In The Deep Channel

Setting a trotline after sundown
if we went far enough away in the night
sometimes up out of deep water
would come a secret-headed channel cat,
.....

William Stafford

Elegy Xviii: Love's Progress

Who ever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
Love is a bear-whelp born: if we o'erlick
.....

John Donne

Hymn 160

Custom in sin.

Let the wild leopards of the wood
Put off the spots that nature gives,
.....

Isaac Watts

The Bridge

I stood on the bridge at midnight,
As the clocks were striking the hour,
And the moon rose o'er the city,
Behind the dark church-tower.
.....

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Still Glides The Gentle Streamlet On

Still glides the gentle streamlet on,
With shifting current new and strange;
The water that was here is gone,
But those green shadows do not change.
.....

Thomas Hood

Sail

A lonely sail is flashing white
Amdist the blue mist of the sea!...
What does it seek in foreign lands?
What did it leave behind at home?..
.....

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov

To A Dancing Doll

Formal, quaint, precise, and trim,
You begin your steps demurely-
There's a spirit almost prim
In the feet that move so surely,
.....

Don Marquis

The Ice-floes

Dawn from the Foretop! Dawn from the Barrel!
A scurry of feet with a roar overhead;
The master-watch wildly pointing to Northward,
Where the herd in front of The Eagle was spread!
.....

E. J. Pratt

Written After Swimming From Sestos To Abydos

If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
.....

George Gordon Lord Byron