SQUARE POEMS

People Like Him

People liked him, not because
He was rich or known to fame;
He had never won applause
As a star in any game.
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

The Maiden's Vow

(A speaker at the National Education Association advised girls not to
study algebra. Many girls, he said, had lost their souls through this
study. The idea has been taken up with enthusiasm.)

.....

Alice Duer Miller

Fuzzy-wuzzy

(Soudan Expeditionary Force)



.....

Rudyard Kipling

The Roll Of The Kettledrum; Or, The Lay Of The Last Charger

“You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet,
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one?”-Byron.
.....

Adam Lindsay Gordon

The Englishman In Italy

(PIANO DI SORRENTO.)

Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
.....

Robert Browning

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
.....

T. S. Eliot

In Praise Of Limestone

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
.....

W. H. Auden

Union Square

With the man I love who loves me not,
I walked in the street-lamps' flare;
We watched the world go home that night
In a flood through Union Square.
.....

Sara Teasdale

Juliet

How did the party go in Portman Square?
I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there.

And how did Lady Gaster's party go?
.....

Hilaire Belloc

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 City Decorated

With his consort pious Rama, pure in deed and pure in thought,
After evening's due ablutions NARAYANA'S chamber sought,

Prayed unto the Lord of Creatures, NARAYANA Ancient Sire,
.....

Valmiki

Out Of The East

When man first walked upright and soberly
Reflecting as he paced to and fro,
And no more swinging from wide tree to tree,
Or sheltered by vast boles from sheltered foe,
.....

John Freeman

The Unsettled Scores

The men are talking peace at 'ome, but 'ere we're talking fight,
There's many a little debt we've got to square;
A sniper sent a bullet through my bunkie's 'ead last night,
And 'is body's lying somewhere h'over there.
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

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

The Hammers: Part 05 - St. Helena, May, 1821

Tap! Tap! Tap!
Through the white tropic night.
Tap! Tap!
Beat the hammers,
.....

Amy Lowell

Loot

If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg be'ind the keeper's back,
If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line,
If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack,
You will understand this little song o' mine.
.....

Rudyard Kipling

The House Of Splendour

â??Tis Evanoe's,
A house not made with hands,
But out somewhere beyond the worldly ways
Her gold is spread, above, around, inwoven;
.....

Ezra Pound

Blades

SOJOURNER, set down
Your skimming wheel;
Nothing is sharp
That we have of steel:
.....

Padraic Colum

The Boy's Ideal

I must be fit for a child to play with,
Fit for a youngster to walk away with;
Fit for his trust and fit to be
Ready to take him upon my knee;
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

Prejudice

IN yonder red-brick mansion, tight and square,
Just at the town's commencement, lives the mayor.
Some yards of shining gravel, fenced with box,
Lead to the painted portal--where one knocks :
.....

Jane Taylor

Christmas Eve

I

Out of the little chapel I burst
Into the fresh night-air again.
.....

Robert Browning

Tannhauser

To my mother. May, 1870.


The Landgrave Hermann held a gathering
.....

Emma Lazarus

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

Comus

A Masque Presented At Ludlow Castle, 1634, Before

The Earl Of Bridgewater, Then President Of Wales.

.....

John Milton

Towns In Colour

I

Red Slippers

.....

Amy Lowell

Afternoon Rain In State Street

Cross-hatchings of rain against grey walls,
Slant lines of black rain
In front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings.
Below,
.....

Amy Lowell

London In July

What ails my senses thus to cheat?
What is it ails the place,
That all the people in the street
Should wear one woman's face?
.....

Amy Levy

Marburg

I quivered. I flared up, and then was extinguished.
I shook. I had made a proposal - but late,
Too late. I was scared, and she had refused me.
I pity her tears, am more blessed than a saint.
.....

Boris Pasternak

Band Concert

Band concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.

Cowboy rags and nigger rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato and the tuba oompa, gigglers, God knows, gigglers daffy with lifeâ??s razzle dazzle.

.....

Carl Sandburg

Home

A home above the year's seasons
home of children animals and apples
a square of empty space
under an absent star
.....

Zbigniew Herbert

From The Top Of The Stairs

Of course
those who are standing at the top of the stairs
know
they know everything
.....

Zbigniew Herbert

A Forsaken Garden

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
.....

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Alnaschar

Here's yer toy balloons! All sizes!
Twenty cents for that. It rises
Jest as quick as that ‘ere, Miss,
Twice as big. Ye see it is
.....

Bret Harte

For The King

Northern Mexico, 1640


As you look from the plaza at Leon west
.....

Bret Harte

The Sisters

In the vine-shadows on the veranda;
under the yellow leaves, in the cooling sun,
sit two sisters. Their slow voices run
like little winter creeks, dwindled by frost and wind,
.....

Judith Wright

The Hairst O' Rettie

I hae seen the hairst o' Rettie, lads,
And twa-three aff the throne.
I've heard o sax and seven weeks
The hairsters girn and groan.
.....

Robert Burns

The Church Of Brou

I
THE CASTLE

Down the Savoy valleys sounding,
.....

Matthew Arnold

On Deck

Midnight in the mid-Atlantic. On deck.
Wrapped up in themselves as in thick veiling
And mute as mannequins in a dress shop,
Some few passangers keep track
.....

Sylvia Plath

The Sprig Of Lime

He lay, and those who watched him were amazed
To see unheralded beneath the lids
Twin tears, new-gathered at the price of pain,
Start and at once run crookedly athwart
.....

Robert Nichols

Psalm

It is a light, that the wind has extinguished.
It is a pub on the heath, that a drunk departs in the afternoon.
It is a vineyard, charred and black with holes full of spiders.
It is a space, that they have white-limed with milk.
.....

Georg Trakl

Sappho Ii

Oh Litis, little slave, why will you sleep?
These long Egyptian noons bend down your head
Bowed like the yarrow with a yellow bee.
There, lift your eyes no man has ever kindled,
.....

Sara Teasdale

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

Canto Iii

Another's a half-cracked fellowâ??John Heydon,
Worker of miracles, dealer in levitation,
In thoughts upon pure form, in alchemy,
Seer of pretty visions ('servant of God and secretary of nature');
.....

Ezra Pound

The Vagabond

It was deadly cold in Danbury town
One terrible night in mid November,
A night that the Danbury folk remember
For the sleety wind that hammered them down,
.....

R. C. Lehmann

In Barracks

The barrack-square, washed clean with rain,
Shines wet and wintry-grey and cold.
Young Fusiliers, strong-legged and bold,
March and wheel and march again.
.....

Siegfried Sassoon

Maternity

There once was a Square, such a square little Square,
And he loved a trim Triangle;
But she was a flirt and around her skirt
Vainly she made him dangle.
.....

Robert William Service

A Legend Of Cologne

Above the bones
St. Ursula owns,
And those of the virgins she chaperons;
Above the boats,
.....

Bret Harte

Disciple

My father: younger, handsome, downright square,
eyes like brown buttons fastening his face
over his soul, mouth not too straight to swear,
to say, man, sonny stitt's ass trashed the place,
.....

Evie Shockley

The Paper Windmill

The little boy pressed his face against the window-pane and looked out
at the bright sunshiny morning. The cobble-stones of the square
glistened like mica. In the trees, a breeze danced and pranced,
and shook drops of sunlight like falling golden coins into the brown water
.....

Amy Lowell

A Hundred Collars

Lancaster bore him-such a little town,
Such a great man. It doesn't see him often
Of late years, though he keeps the old homestead
And sends the children down there with their mother
.....

Robert Frost