PENNY POEMS

The Holy Fair

A note of seeming truth and trust
Hid crafty observation;
And secret hung, with poison'd crust,
The dirk of defamation:
.....

Robert Burns

My Boy

I have a little boy at home,
A pretty little son;
I think sometimes the world is mine
In him, my only one.
.....

Morris Rosenfeld

The Reckoning

All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.
.....

Theodore Roethke

Two Words

‘God' is composed of letters three,
But if you put an ‘l'
Before the last it seems to me
A synonym for Hell.
.....

Robert Service

Gunga Din

You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out ‘ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
.....

Rudyard Kipling

The Jackaw Of Rheims

The Jackdaw sat on the Cardinal's chair!
Bishop, and abbot, and prior were there;
Many a monk, and many a friar,
Many a knight, and many a squire,
.....

Richard Harris Barham

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 Lady

You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
.....

Amy Lowell

All In A Family Way

My banks are all furnished with rags,
So thick, even Freddy can't thin 'em;
I've torn up my old money-bags,
Having little or nought to put in 'em.
.....

Thomas Moore

Market Women-s Cries

APPLES

COME buy my fine wares,
Plums, apples and pears.
.....

Jonathan Swift

The Young Man's Song

I Whispered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
.....

William Butler Yeats

The Cotter's Saturday Night

INSCRIBED TO ROBERT AIKEN, ESQ.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
.....

Robert Burns

Wages

My lass, when God
to suffer sent me,
no gifts he gave,
but only lent me
.....

Norman Rowland Gale

Old And New Art

I. St. Luke The Painter

Give honour unto Luke Evangelist;
For he it was (the aged legends say)
.....

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Market Women's Cries

APPLES

Come buy my fine wares,
Plums, apples and pears.
.....

Jonathan Swift

My Nannie, O

Behind yon hills, where Lugar flows,
'Mang moors an' mosses many, O,
The wintry sun the day has clos'd,
And I'll awa to Nannie, O.
.....

Robert Burns

Stopped Dead

A squeal of brakes.
Or is it a birth cry?
And here we are, hung out over the dead drop
Uncle, pants factory Fatso, millionaire.
.....

Sylvia Plath

Charity

O why your good deeds with such pride do you scan,
And why that self-satisfied smile
At the shilling you gave to the poor working man,
That lifted you over the stile?
.....

Charles Lamb

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

Lost Mr. Blake

Mr. Blake was a regular out-and-out hardened sinner,
Who was quite out of the pale of Christianity, so to speak,
He was in the habit of smoking a long pipe and drinking a glass of
grog on a Sunday after dinner,
.....

William Schwenck Gilbert

A Manager's Perplexities

Were I a king in very truth,
And had a son - a guileless youth -
In probable succession;
To teach him patience, teach him tact,
.....

William Schwenck Gilbert

Goblin Market

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
.....

Christina Rossetti

The Gypsy Girl

'Come, try your skill, kind gentlemen,
A penny for three tries!'
Some threw and lost, some threw and won
A ten-a-penny prize.
.....

Ralph Hodgson

All Lovely Things

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.
.....

Conrad Aiken

Sword Blades And Poppy Seed

A drifting, April, twilight sky,
A wind which blew the puddles dry,
And slapped the river into waves
That ran and hid among the staves
.....

Amy Lowell

Song-i Hae A Wife O' My Ain

I HAE a wife of my ain,
I'll partake wi' naebody;
I'll take Cuckold frae nane,
I'll gie Cuckold to naebody.
.....

Robert Burns

The Road

here where you see a green valley
And a road half-covered with grass,
Through an oak wood beginning to bloom
Children are returning home from school.
.....

Czeslaw Milosz

Street Music

There's a band in the street, there's a band in the street.
It will play you a tune for a pennyâ??
It will play you a tune, you a tune, you a tune,
And you, though you haven't got any,
.....

Lesbia Harford

Damages, Two Hundred Pounds

Special Jurymen of England! who admire your country's laws,
And proclaim a British Jury worthy of the realm's applause;
Gayly compliment each other at the issue of a cause
Which was tried at Guildford 'sizes, this day week as ever was.
.....

William Makepeace Thackeray

London Types: Barmaid

Though, if you ask her name, she says 'Elise,'
Being plain Elizabeth, e'en let it pass,
And own that, if her aspirates take their ease,
She ever makes a point, in washing glass,
.....

William Ernest Henley

Expectation

Expectation is mental illness,
Which makes people go mad,
If we have a single penny,
We will expect to have two.
.....

Norbu Dorji

Gunner Joe

I'll tell you a seafaring story,
Of a lad who won honour and fame
Wi' Nelson at Battle 'Trafalgar,
Joe Moggeridge, that were his name.
.....

Marriott Edgar

Naebody.

Tune - "Naebody."


I.
.....

Robert Burns

Lucy Locket

Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
But ne'er a penny was there in't,
Except the binding round it.
.....

Walter Crane

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

Penny Wise, Pound Poor

Fall was a tubercular cousin
residing in the country
sparse hair,
rasping cough.
.....

Paul Cameron Brown

Window Shopper

I stood before a candy shop
Which with a Christmas radiance shone;
I saw my parents pass and stop
To grin at me and then go on.
.....

Robert Service

A Young Child And His Pregnant Mother

At four years Nature is mountainous,
Mysterious, and submarine. Even

A city child knows this, hearing the subway's
.....

Delmore Schwartz

The Effect

“The effect of our bombardment was terrific. One man
told me he had never seen so many dead before.”-War Correspondent.

“He'd never seen so many dead before.”
.....

Siegfried Sassoon

Brother Bruin

A dancing Bear grotesque and funny
Earned for his master heaps of money,
Gruff yet good-natured, fond of honey,
And cheerful if the day was sunny.
.....

Christina Rossetti

The Ubique

There is a word you often see, pronounce it as you may -
'You bike,' 'you bikwe,' 'ubbikwe' - alludin' to R.A.
It serves 'Orse, Field, an' Garrison as motto for a crest,
An' when you've found out all it means I'll tell you 'alf the rest.
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Robin And Harry

Robin to beggars with a curse,
Throws the last shilling in his purse;
And when the coachman comes for pay,
The rogue must call another day.
.....

Jonathan Swift

Music

I
MUSIC, on the air's edge, rides alone,
Plumed like empastured Caesars of the sky
With a god's helmet; now, in the gold dye
.....

Kenneth Slessor

The Old Lizard

In the parched path
I have seen the good lizard
(one dropp of crocodile)
meditating.
.....

Federico Garcà­a Lorca

Christmas

Christmas is come and every hearth
Makes room to give him welcome now
E'en want will dry its tears in mirth
And crown him wi' a holly bough
.....

John Clare

Nemesis

}
};


.....

Henry Lawson

Grace Jennings Carmicheal

I hate the pen, the foolscap fair,
The poetâ??s corner, and the page,
For Grief and Death are written there,
In every land and every age.
.....

Henry Lawson

A Demand

You promised to paint me a picture,
Dear Mat,
And I was to pay you in rhyme.
Although I am loth to inflict your
.....

Ambrose Bierce

The Laddie's Dear Sel'

THERE'S a youth in this city, it were a great pity
That he from our lassies should wander awa';
For he's bonie and braw, weel-favor'd witha',
An' his hair has a natural buckle an' a'.
.....

Robert Burns

Monkeys

Two little creatures
with faces the size of
a pair of pennies
are clasping each other
.....

Padraic Colum