ROVER POEMS

The Cloak, The Boat And The Shoes

‘What do you make so fair and bright?'

‘I make the cloak of Sorrow:
O lovely to see in all men's sight
.....

William Butler Yeats

Adventure

Out of the wood my White Knight came:
His eyes were bright with a bitter flame,
As I clung to his stirrup leather;
For I was only a dreaming lad,
.....

Robert Service

Girls Spinning

FIRST GIRL
MALLO lero iss im bo nero!
Go where they're threshing and find me my lover,
Mallo lero iss im bo bairn!
.....

Padraic Colum

The Coranna

Fast by his wild resounding River
The listless Coran lingers ever;
Still drives his heifers forth to feed,
Soothed by the gorrah's humming reed;
.....

Thomas Pringle

A Rolling Stone

There's sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
.....

Robert Service

The Fickle Breeze

Sighing softly to the river
Comes the loving breeze,
Setting nature all a-quiver,
Rustling through the trees!
.....

William Schwenck Gilbert

Gone With A Handsomer Man.

JOHN:

I've worked in the field all day, a-plowin' the "stony streak;"
I've scolded my team till I'm hoarse; I've tramped till my legs are weak;
.....

Will Carleton

Snap-dragon

She bade me follow to her garden, where
The mellow sunlight stood as in a cup
Between the old grey walls; I did not dare
To raise my face, I did not dare look up,
.....

D. H. Lawrence

Vaquero

His broad-brimmed hat pushed back with careless air,
The proud vaquero sits his steed as free
As winds that toss his black abundant hair.
No rover ever swept a lawless sea
.....

Joaquin Miller

Commination

The prayers are o'er: why slumberest thou so long,
Thou voice of sacred song?
Why swell'st thou not, like breeze from mountain cave,
High o'er the echoing nave,
.....

John Keble

A Dedication To The Author Of Holmby House

They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
.....

Adam Lindsay Gordon

The Wind

He shouts in the sails of the ships at sea,
He steals the down from the honeybee,
He makes the forest trees rustle and sing,
He twirls my kite till it breaks its string.
.....

Amy Lowell

Rover

No classic warrior tempts my pen
To fill with verse these pages
No lordly-hearted man of men
My Muse's thought engages.
.....

Henry Kendall

Heart O' The North

And when I come to the dim trail-end,
I who have been Life's rover,
This is all I would ask, my friend,
Over and over and over:
.....

Robert Service

Sunshine

I

Flat as a drum-head stretch the haggard snows;
The mighty skies are palisades of light;
.....

Robert Service

Beyond The Blue

I

Speak of you, sir? You bet he did. Ben Fields was far too sound
To go back on a fellow just because he weren't around.
.....

Emily Pauline Johnson

Cadet Grey: Canto Ii

I

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

Bret Harte

The Lodger

I cannot
quite recall
When first he came,
So reticent and tall,
.....

Bliss Carman

A Rover's Song

Snowdrift of the mountains,
Spindrift of the sea,
We who down the border
Rove from gloom to glee,-
.....

Bliss Carman And Richard Hovey

The Rovers

Some born of homely parents
For ages settled downâ??
The steady generations
Of village, farm, and town:
.....

Henry Lawson

A Chantey Of Labor's Lost

There on the quay sobbed Bones, A.B.,
And he took me by the hand.
Says he to me, 'I've quit the sea
An' I'm huntin' a berth on land.
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

Ensilage

The farmers now should all adorn
A few fields with sweet southern corn,
It is luscious, thick and tall,
The beauty of the fields in fall.
.....

James Mcintyre

The Visitor

it came today to visit
and moved into the house
it was smaller than an elephant
but larger than a mouse
.....

Jack Prelutsky

Blue

The earth again like a ship steams out of the dark sea over
The edge of the blue, and the sun stands up to see us glide
Slowly into another day; slowly the rover
Vessel of darkness takes the rising tide.
.....

D. H. Lawrence

Wind

He shouts in the sails of the ships at sea,
He steals the down from the honeybee,
He makes the forest trees rustle and sing,
He twirls my kite till it breaks its string.
.....

Amy Lowell

This, My Song, Is Made For Kerensky

(Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian Revolution.)


O market square, O slattern place,
.....

Vachel Lindsay

I Know My Love

I know my Love by his way of walking,
And I know my love by his way of talking,
And I know my love dressed in a suit of blue,
And if my Love leaves me, what will I do?
.....

Anonymous

Cadet Grey: Canto Iii

I

Where the sun sinks through leagues of arid sky,
Where the sun dies o'er leagues of arid plain,
.....

Bret Harte

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

The Rover's Apology

Oh, gentlemen, listen, I pray;
Though I own that my heart has been ranging,
Of nature the laws I obey,
For nature is constantly changing.
.....

William Schwenck Gilbert

The Cottager

True as the church clock hand the hour pursues
He plods about his toils and reads the news,
And at the blacksmith's shop his hour will stand
To talk of 'Lunun' as a foreign land.
.....

John Clare

The Seven Sisters

Or, The Solitude Of Binnorie

SEVEN Daughter had Lord Archibald,
All children of one mother:
.....

William Wordsworth

A Christmas Fancy

Early on Christmas Day,
Love, as awake I lay,
And heard the Christmas bells ring sweet and clearly,
My heart stole through the gloom
.....

Robert Fuller Murray

Primroses

I
Latest, earliest of the year,
Primroses that still were here,
Snugly nestling round the boles
.....

Alfred Austin

Reveille

Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.
.....

Alfred Edward Housman

To Poesy

Yet do not thou forsake me now,
Poesy, with Peace-together!
Ere this last disastrous blow
Did lay my struggling fortunes low,
.....

Charles Harpur

The Ballad Of The Drover

Across the stony ridges,
Across the rolling plain,
Young Harry Dale, the drover,
Comes riding home again.
.....

Henry Lawson

Peter Bell - A Tale (part Second)

PART SECOND

We left our Hero in a trance,
Beneath the alders, near the river;
.....

William Wordsworth

The Whitest Man I Know

& R. Fenton Gower


He's acruisin' in a pearler with a dirty nigger crew,
.....

John Milton Hayes

Cuppacumalonga

'Rover, rover, cattle-drover, where go you to-day?'
I go to Cuppacumalomga, fifty miles away;
Over plains where Summer rains have sung a song of glee,
Over hills where laughing rills go seeking for the sea,
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

Peter Bell - A Tale (full)

A TALE

What's in a 'Name'?
. . . . .
.....

William Wordsworth

Inchcape Rock

s she could be;
Her sails from heaven received no motion,
Her keel was steady in the ocean.

.....

Robert Southey

Song-the Young Highland Rover

LOUD blaw the frosty breezes,
The snaws the mountains cover;
Like winter on me seizes,
Since my young Highland rover
.....

Robert Burns

Jack The Rover

'MY brother Jack the Rover, Sir!'
'Bless me, I thought he was a cousin?'
'Bound on a voyage to Elsinore!'
'Most merry damsels have a dozen!'
.....

Joseph Skipsey

Peter Bell - A Tale (part First)

PART FIRST

ALL by the moonlight river side
Groaned the poor Beast alas! in vain;
.....

William Wordsworth

Cadet Grey

Canto I

I

.....

Bret Harte (francis)

The Young Highland Rover.

Tune - "Morag."


I.
.....

Robert Burns

Sea Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea's face, and a gray dawn breaking.
.....

John Masefield

The Rover's Adieu

A weary lot is thine, fair maid,
A weary lot is thine!
To pull the thorn thy brow to braid,
And press the rue for wine.
.....

Sir Walter Scott

Let Us Be Merry Before We Go

If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking,
Could, more than drinking, my cares compose
A cure for sorrow from sighs I'd borrow,
And hope to-morrow would end my woes.
.....

John Philpot Curran