GOOSE POEMS

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle-shells
And pretty maids all in a row!”
.....

Don Marquis

Life Doesn't Frighten Me

Shadows on the wall
Noises down the hall
Life doesn't frighten me at all

.....

Maya Angelou

My Last Afternoon With Uncle Devereux Winslow

1922: the stone porch of my Grandfatherâ??s summer house

I
â??I wonâ??t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!â?
.....

Robert Lowell

Rhyme

I've got a stubborn goose whose gut's
Honeycombed with golden eggs,
Yet won't lay one.
She, addled in her goose-wit, struts
.....

Sylvia Plath

The Butterfly

SISTER.
Do, my dearest brother John,
Let that butterfly alone.

.....

Charles Lamb

The Deserted Village

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visits paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed:
.....

Oliver Goldsmith

Badger

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole, and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
.....

John Clare

An Alphabet

A is the Alphabet, A at its head;
A is an Antelope, agile to run.
B is the Baker Boy bringing the bread,
Or black Bear and brown Bear, both begging for bun.
.....

Christina Rossetti

A Remonstrance With The Fair

There are thoughts that the mind cannot fathom,
The mind of the animal male;
But woman abundantly hath 'em,
And mostly her notions prevail.
.....

Andrew Lang

Dead Leaves

DAWN

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

James Whitcomb Riley

Ode To Rae Wilson Esq.

A WANDERER, Wilson, from my native land,
Remote, O Rae, from godliness and thee,
Where rolls between us the eternal sea,
Besides some furlongs of a foreign sand,â??
.....

Thomas Hood

The Green Knight's Farewell To Fancy

n my hat full harebrainedly, thy flowers did I wear:
Too late I find (at last), thy fruits are nothing worth,
Thy blossoms fall and fade full fast, though bravery bring them forth.
By thee I hoped always, in deep delights to dwell,
.....

George Gascoigne

The Moon

rming to my sight;
As I gaze upon thee in the sky so high,
A tear of joy does moisten mine eye.

.....

Max Plowman

Sherwood

Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?
Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake;
Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn,
Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.
.....

Alfred Noyes

Gemini And Virgo

Some vast amount of years ago,
Ere all my youth had vanished from me,
A boy it was my lot to know,
Whom his familiar friends called Tommy.
.....

Charles Stuart Calverley

Prosody 101

When they taught me that what mattered most
was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping
over the page but the variations
in that line and the tension produced
.....

Linda Pastan

Desire

The first time I saw you
I didn't really like you
For the reason that
I am afraid to love you
.....

Lynda

Lone Wild Goose

Alone, the wild goose refuses food and drink,
his calls searching for the flock.

Who feels compassion for that single shadow
.....

Du Fu

Isaac And Archibald

(To Mrs. Henry Richards)

Isaac and Archibald were two old men.
I knew them, and I may have laughed at them
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The Progress Of Poetry

The Farmer's Goose, who in the Stubble,
Has fed without Restraint, or Trouble;
Grown fat with Corn and Sitting still,
Can scarce get o'er the Barn-Door Sill:
.....

Jonathan Swift

Thinking Of My Brothers On A Moonlit Night

Drums on the watch-tower have emptied the roads -
At the frontier it's autumn; a wild-goose cries.
This is a night in which dew becomes frost;
The moon is bright like it used to be at home.
.....

Du Fu

The Hand That Signed The Paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
.....

Dylan Thomas

Bells For John Whiteside's Daughter

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study Astonishes us all

.....

John Crowe Ransom

Quatrains Of Life

What has my youth been that I love it thus,
Sad youth, to all but one grown tedious,
Stale as the news which last week wearied us,
Or a tired actor's tale told to an empty house?
.....

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Lilacs

Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
.....

Amy Lowell

A Hero To His Hobby-horse.

Hear me now, my hobby-horse, my steed of prancing paces!
Time is it that you and I won something more than races.
I have got a fine cocked hat, with feathers proudly waving;
Out into the world we'll go, both death and danger braving.
.....

Juliana Horatia Ewing

Crazy Jane And The Bishop

Bring me to the blasted oak
That I, midnight upon the stroke,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
May call down curses on his head
.....

William Butler Yeats

A Verseman's Apology

Alas! I am only a rhymer,
I don't know the meaning of Art;
But I learned in my little school primer
To love Eugene Field and Bret Harte.
.....

Robert Service

Flies

I never kill a fly because
I think that what we have of laws
To regulate and civilize
Our daily life-we owe to flies.
.....

Robert Service

While The Bannock Bakes

Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;
I've got to watch the bannock bake-how restful is the air!
You'd little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,
Though where I don't exactly know, and don't precisely care.
.....

Robert Service

The Last Days

The russet leaves of the sycamore
Lie at last on the valley floor-
By the autumn wind swept to and fro
Like ghosts in a tale of long ago.
.....

George Sterling

Marmion

Heap on more wood!-the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still.
Each age has deem'd the new-born year
.....

Sir Walter Scott

Nell Flaherty's Drake

My name it is Nell, right candid I tell,
And I live near a dell I ne'er will deny,
I had a large drake, the truth for to spake,
My grandfather left me when going to die;
.....

Anonymous

A Confidence

Uncle John, he makes me tired;
Thinks ‘at he's jest so all-fired
Smart, ‘at he kin pick up, so,
Ever'thing he wants to know.
.....

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Babylon

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all's poetry with him.
.....

Robert Graves

Back To The Army Again

I'm 'ere in a ticky ulster an' a broken billycock 'at,
A-layin' on the sergeant I don't know a gun from a bat;
My shirt's doin' duty for jacket, my sock's stickin' out o' my boots,
An' I'm learnin' the damned old goose-step along o' the new recruits!
.....

Rudyard Kipling

How Robin And His Outlaws Lived In The Woods

Robin and his merry men
: Lived just like the birds;
They had almost as many tracks as thoughts,
: And whistles and songs as words.
.....

James Henry Leigh Hunt

P-eng-ya Road

I remember fleeing the rebels
through dangerous northern canyons,

the midnight moon shining bright
.....

Du Fu

The Badger

track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes and hears - they let the strongest loose.
.....

John Clare

A Poem For Myself

I was born in Mississippi;
I walked barefooted thru the mud.
Born black in Mississippi,
Walked barefooted thru the mud.
.....

Etheridge Knight

The Vote Of Thanks Debate

The Other Night I got the blues and tried to smile in vain.
I couldnâ??t chuck a chuckle at the foolery of Twain;
When Ward and Billings failed to bring a twinkle to my eye,
I turned my eyes to Hansard of the fifteenth of July.
.....

Henry Lawson

An Evening Walk, Addressed To A Young Lady

The young Lady to whom this was addressed was my Sister. It was
composed at school, and during my two first College vacations.
There is not an image in it which I have not observed; and now, in
my seventy-third year, I recollect the time and place where most
.....

William Wordsworth

Ox Cart Man

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
.....

Donald Hall

On The Best, Last, And Only Remaning Comedy Of Mr. Fletcher. The Wild Goose Chase

I'm un-ore-clowded, too! free from the mist!
The blind and late Heaven's-eyes great Occulist,
Obscured with the false fires of his sceme,
Not half those souls are lightned by this theme.
.....

Richard Lovelace

Belly Good

A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs
but I've never seen wheat in a pile.
Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots
make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek
.....

Marge Piercy

L-allegro

Felicity!
Who ope'st to none that knocks, yet, laughing weak,
Yield'st all to Love that will not seek,
And who, though won, wilt droop and die,
.....

Coventry Patmore

Egyptian Theosophy

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.....

Mathilde Blind

Hudibras: Part 1 - Canto I

THE ARGUMENT

Sir Hudibras his passing worth,
The manner how he sallied forth;
.....

Samuel Butler

The Auld Wife

PART I

The auld wife sat at her ivied door,
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
.....

Charles Stuart Calverley

Ode To Tobacco

Thou, who when fears attack
Bidst them avaunt, and Black
Care, at the horseman's back
Perching, unseatest;
.....

Charles Stuart Calverley