EPIC POEMS

To A Bird At Dawn

O bird that somewhere yonder sings,
In the dim hour 'twixt dreams and dawn,
Lone in the hush of sleeping things,
In some sky sanctuary withdrawn;
.....

Richard Le Gallienne

Open House

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
.....

Theodore Roethke

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
.....

Patrick Kavanagh

Thousand Star Hotel, Hanoi

I.

Over the road from the three star Galaxy Hotel is our hotel,
the old park on Phan Dinh Phung Street,
.....

S. K. Kelen

Humanitad

It is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn's gaudy livery whose gold
.....

Oscar Wilde

Arms And The Man. - Prologue.

Full-burnished through the long-revolving years
The ploughshare of a Century to-day
Runs peaceful furrows where a crop of Spears
Once stood in War's array.
.....

James Barron Hope

Brahmā, Vişņu, Śiva

I THE DARK

In a worldless timeless lightless great emptiness
Four-faced Brahma broods.
.....

Rabindranath Tagore

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

The Epic Stars

The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
.....

Robinson Jeffers

The Gardener Xxxviii: My Love, Once Upon A Time

My love, once upon a time your poet
launched a great epic in his mind.
Alas, I was not careful, and it struck
your ringing anklets and came to
.....

Rabindranath Tagore

Life

What know we of the dead, who say these things,
Or of the life in death below the mould--
What of the mystic laws that rule the old
Grey realms beyond our poor imaginings
.....

Victor James Daley

John Horace Burleson

I won the prize essay at school
Here in the village,
And published a novel before I was twenty-five.
I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art;
.....

Edgar Lee Masters

An Ode - In Commemoration Of The Founding, Of The Massachusetts Bay Colony In The Year 1623.

I.

They who maintained their rights,
Through storm and stress,
.....

Madison Julius Cawein

Captain Craig Ii

Yet that ride had an end, as all rides have;
And the days coming after took the road
That all days take,-though never one of them
Went by but I got some good thought of it
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Don Juan: Canto The First

I
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
.....

George Gordon Byron

Pisidice

The incident is from the Love Stories of Parthenius, who
preserved fragments of a lost epic on the expedition of
Achilles against Lesbos, an island allied with Troy.

.....

Andrew Lang

Rizpah

SAID one who led the spears of swarthy Gad,
To Jesseâ??s mighty son: â??My Lord, O King,
I, halting hard by Gibeonâ??s bleak-blown hill
Three nightfalls past, saw dark-eyed Rizpah, clad
.....

Henry Kendall

At Sea

When the investing darkness growls,
And deep reverberates to deep;
When keyhole whines and chimney howls,
And all the roofs and windows weep;
.....

Ada Cambridge

Poetry

THE POETRY OF CHAUCER

Grey with all honours of age! but fresh-featured and ruddy
As dawn when the drowsy farm-yard has thrice heard Chaunticlere.
.....

George Meredith

Adventure Of A Poet

As I was walking down the street
A week ago,
Near Henderson's I chanced to meet
A man I know.
.....

Robert Fuller Murray

The Epic Of The Lion

A Lion in his jaws caught up a child--
Not harming it--and to the woodland, wild
With secret streams and lairs, bore off his prey--
The beast, as one might cull a bud in May.
.....

Victor Marie Hugo

The Ladle. A Tale

The Sceptics think 'twas long ago
Since gods came down
incognito

.....

Matthew Prior

Don Juan: Canto The Eighth

The town was taken--whether he might yield
Himself or bastion, little matter'd now:
His stubborn valour was no future shield.
Ismail's no more! The Crescent's silver bow
.....

George Gordon Byron

Don Juan: Canto The Sixteenth

The antique Persians taught three useful things,
To draw the bow, to ride, and speak the truth.
This was the mode of Cyrus, best of kings--
A mode adopted since by modern youth.
.....

George Gordon Byron

The Woman

Go sleep, my sweetie-rest-rest!
Oh soft little hand on mother's breast!
Oh soft little lips-the din's mos' gone-
Over and done, my dearie one!
.....

Harriet Monroe

Imitations Of Horace: The First Epistle Of The Second Book

Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere
(Horace, Epistles II.i.267)
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
.....

Alexander Pope

English Bards And Scotch Reviewers (excerpt)

Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days
Ignoble themes obtain'd mistaken praise,
When sense and wit with poesy allied,
No fabl'd graces, flourish'd side by side;
.....

George Gordon Byron

Translation Of The Epitaph On Virgil And Tibullus, By Domitius Marsus

He who, sublime, in epic numbers roll'd,
And he who struck the softer lyre of Love,
By Death's unequal hand alike controul'd,
Fit comrades in Elysian regions move!
.....

George Gordon Lord Byron

The Poetry Of Southey

Keen as an eagle whose flight towards the dim empyrean
Fearless of toil or fatigue ever royally wends!
Vast in the cloud-coloured robes of the balm-breathing Orient
Lo! the grand Epic advances, unfolding the humanest truth.
.....

George Meredith

Recital Of The Ramayana

When the silent night was ended, and their pure ablutions done,
Joyous went the minstrel brothers, and their lofty lay begun,

Rama to the hermit minstrels lent a monarch's willing car,
.....

Valmiki

A Song Of The Pen

Not for the love of women toil we, we of the craft,
Not for the people's praise;
Only because our goddess made us her own and laughed,
Claiming us all our days,
.....

Banjo Paterson (andrew Barton)

A Song Of The Pen

Not for the love of women toil we, we of the craft,
Not for the people's praise;
Only because our goddess made us her own and laughed,
Claiming us all our days,
.....

Banjo Paterson

The Garlands

KLOPSTOCK would lead us away from Pindus; no longer for laurel
May we be eager--the homely acorn alone must content us;
Yet he himself his more-than-epic crusade is conducting
High on Golgotha's summit, that foreign gods he may honour!
.....

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The Epic

At Francis Allen's on the Christmas-eve,--
The game of forfeits done--the girls all kiss'd
Beneath the sacred bush and past away--
The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

To The Tiber

On its late (in 1871) Inundation of Rome

Well done, old Flood, that, hiding a clear eye
Beneath thy yellow veil, dost wend among
.....

Sydney Thompson Dobell

Love, The Song Of Songs

Over the roar of cities,
Over the hush of the hills,
Mounts ever a song that never stops,
A voice that never stills.
.....

Madison Julius Cawein

The Baptism

(an excerpt from the epic The Baptism at The Savica)

The warring clouds have vanished from the skies;
The war of men has ended with the night.
.....

France Preseren

National Nomenclature - Prose

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker.

SIR: I am somewhat of the same way of thinking, in regard to names, with that profound philosopher, Mr. Shandy, the elder, who maintained that some inspired high thoughts and heroic aims, while others entailed irretrievable meanness and vulgarity; insomuch that a man might sink under the insignificance of his name, and be absolutely "Nicodemused into nothing." I have ever, therefore, thought it a great hardship for a man to be obliged to struggle through life with some ridiculous or ignoble Christian name, as it is too often falsely called, inflicted on him in infancy, when he could not choose for himself; and would give him free liberty to change it for one more to his taste, when he had arrived at years of discretion.

.....

Washington Irving

A Letter To Monsieur Boileau Despreaux, Occasioned By The Victory At Blenheim

Since hired for life, thy servile Muse must sing
Successive conquests and a glorious King;
Must of a man immortal vainly boast,
And bring him laurels whatsoe'er they cost,
.....

Matthew Prior

The Statue Of Victor Hugo

I.

Since in Athens God stood plain for adoration,
Since the sun beheld his likeness reared in stone,
.....

Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Spooniad

[The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon
River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books,
but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first
book. The fragment was found among his papers by William
.....

Edgar Lee Masters

Pippa Passes: Part I: Morning

Scene. Up the Hill-side, inside the Shrub-house. Luca's wife, Ottima, and her paramour, the German Sebald.


Sebald
.....

Robert Browning

The Dunciad: Book I

The Mighty Mother, and her son who brings
The Smithfield muses to the ear of kings,
I sing. Say you, her instruments the great!
Called to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate;
.....

Alexander Pope

The Princess (part Ii)

At break of day the College Portress came:
She brought us Academic silks, in hue
The lilac, with a silken hood to each,
And zoned with gold; and now when these were on,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

Night In New York

Haunted by unknown feet-
Ways of the midnight hour!
Strangely you murmur below me,
Strange is your half-silent power.
.....

George Parsons Lathrop

The Forefather

HERE at the country inn,
I lie in my quiet bed,
And the ardent onrush of armies
Throbs and throbs in my head.
.....

Richard Francis Burton

An Impromptu

Not premeditated


THE clock has struck noon; ere it thrice tell the hours
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love On Scooter - An Epic Romance

A Lad training beloved Scooter, gradually...
Raw emotions flowing,gradually...

Diva Seeking Support, puts hand of Lad's shoulder...
.....

Mech Boy Satendra Bekaraar

Genoa And The Mediterranean.

O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,
Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee
When from Torino's track I saw thy face first flash on me.

.....

Thomas Hardy