WHISTLE POEMS

Morning Express

Along the wind-swept platform, pinched and white,
The travellers stand in pools of wintry light,
Offering themselves to morn's long, slanting arrows.
The train's due; porters trundle laden barrows.
.....

Siegfried Sassoon

The Old Huntsman

I've never ceased to curse the day I signed
A seven years' bargain for the Golden Fleece.
'Twas a bad deal all round; and dear enough
It cost me, what with my daft management,
.....

Siegfried Sassoon

I Don't Want To Die

I WANT to go home,
I want to go home,
I don't want to go in the trenches no more,
Where whizz-bangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar.
.....

Anonymous Americas

I Don't Want To Die

I want to go home,
I want to go home,
I don't want to go in the trenches no more,
Where whizz-bangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar.
.....

Anonymous

Bob White

I see you, on the zigzag rails,
You cheery little fellow!
While purple leaves are whirling down,
And scarlet, brown, and yellow.
.....

George Cooper

Mary

I.

Who is she, the poor Maniac, whose wildly-fix'd eyes
Seem a heart overcharged to express?
.....

Robert Southey

O Whistle, And I'll Come To You.

I.

O whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad,
O whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad:
.....

Robert Burns

The Hawthorn Tree

Not much to me is yonder lane
Where I go every day;
But when there's been a shower of rain
And hedge-birds whistle gay,
.....

Siegfried Sassoon

Like The Gods. . .

In my eyes he matches the gods, that man who
sits there facing you--any man whatever--
listening from closeby to the sweetness of your
voice as you talk, the
.....

Sappho

A Ballad Of Footmen

Now what in the name of the sun and the stars
Is the meaning of this most unholy of wars?

Do men find life so full of humour and joy
.....

Amy Lowell

The Twa Herds; Or, The Holy Tulyie

O A' ye pious godly flocks,
Weel fed on pastures orthodox,
Wha now will keep you frae the fox,
Or worrying tykes?
.....

Robert Burns

Nebraska

April doesnt hurt here
Like it does in New England
The ground
Vast and brown
.....

Jack Kerouac

Tin Wedding Whistle

Though you know it anyhow
Listen to me, darling, now,
Proving what I need not prove
How I know I love you, love.
.....

Ogden Nash

I Thought The Train Would Never Come'

1449

I thought the Train would never come-
How slow the whistle sang-
.....

Emily Dickinson

Otters

I'LL be an otter, and I'll let you swim
A mate beside me; we will venture down
A deep, full river when the sky above
Is shut of the sun; spoilers are we;
.....

Padraic Colum

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

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

Amy Lowell

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

All The Dead Dears

Rigged poker -stiff on her back
With a granite grin
This antique museum-cased lady
Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
.....

Sylvia Plath

As You Leave Me

Shiny record albums scattered over
the living room floor, reflecting light
from the lamp, sharp reflections that hurt
my eyes as I watch you, squatting among the platters,
.....

Etheridge Knight

In The Public Library

Standing on tiptoe, head back, eyes and arm
Upraised, Kate groped to reach the higher shelf.
Her sleeve slid up like darkness in alarm
At gleam of dawn. Impatient with herself
.....

Lesbia Harford

King Henry Vii And The Shipwrights

Harry, our King in England, from London town is gone,
And comen to Hamull on the Hoke in the Countie of Suthampton.
For there lay the Mary of the Tower, his ship of war so strong,
And he would discover, certaynely, if his shipwrights did him wrong.
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Just Whistle A Bit

Just whistle a bit, if the day be dark,
And the sky be overcast:
If mute be the voice of the piping lark,
Why, pipe your own small blast.
.....

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking

1

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
.....

Walt Whitman

Lost

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
.....

Carl Sandburg

Tam O'shanter

A Tale

“Of Brownyis and of Bogilis full is this Buke.”
-Gawin Douglas.
.....

Robert Burns

The Choice

He'd have given me rolling lands,
Houses of marble, and billowing farms,
Pearls, to trickle between my hands,
Smoldering rubies, to circle my arms.
.....

Dorothy Parker

Comus

A Masque Presented At Ludlow Castle, 1634, Before

The Earl Of Bridgewater, Then President Of Wales.

.....

John Milton

Time-stone

Hallo, Metropolitan-
Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
Red eye notching the darkness.
No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
.....

Lola Ridge

Memento

Scattered through the ragtaggle underbrush starting to show green shoots
lie the dark remains of rail sleepers napping now beside the rusted-out wreck

of a Chevy that was once sky-blue and now is nothing but shattered panels and
.....

Eamon Grennan

Oh, Oh, You Will Be Sorry

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give me back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
"What a big book for such a little head!"
.....

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cottleston Pie

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.
.....

Alan Alexander Milne

Definition Of Poetry

It's a whistle blown ripe in a trice,
It's the cracking of ice in a gale,
It's a night that turns green leaves to ice,
It's a duel of two nightingales.
.....

Boris Pasternak

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

The Wind And The Moon

Said the Wind to the Moon, “I will blow you out!
You stare
In the air
As if crying Beware,
.....

George Macdonald

In The Factory

Oh, here in the shop the machines roar so wildly,
That oft, unaware that I am, or have been,
I sink and am lost in the terrible tumult;
And void is my soul… I am but a machine.
.....

Morris Rosenfeld

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

Sam Holt

Oh! don't you remember Black Alice, Sam Holt
Black Alice, so dusky and dark,
The Warrego gin, with the straw through her nose,
And teeth like a Moreton Bay shark.
.....

Banjo Paterson

Words

Out of us all
That make rhymes
Will you choose
Sometimes -
.....

Edward Thomas

Rip

It can't be the passing of time that casts
That white shadow across the waters
Just offshore.
I shiver a little, with the evening.
.....

James Arlington Wright

Sea-shore Memories

OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child,
.....

Walt Whitman

Sketches In The Exhibition

What various objects strike with various force,
Achilles, Hebe, and Sir Watkin's horse!
Here summer scenes, there Pentland's stormy ridge,
Lords, ladies, Noah's ark, and Cranford bridge!
.....

William Lisle Bowles

The Prayer Of Agassiz

On the isle of Penikese,
Ringed about by sapphire seas,
Fanned by breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school.
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

Towns In Colour

I

Red Slippers

.....

Amy Lowell

Mogg Megone - Part Iii.

Ah! weary Priest! - with pale hands pressed
On thy throbbing brow of pain,
Baffled in thy life-long quest,
Overworn with toiling vain,
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

Dedication From "barrack Room Ballads"

Beyond the path of the outmost sun through utter darkness hurled,
Farther than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled,
Live such as fought and- sailed and ruled and loved and made our world.

.....

Rudyard Kipling

The Grief Of A Girl's Heart

O Donall og, if you go across the sea, bring myself with you and do not forget it; and you will have a sweetheart for fair days and market days, and the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at night. It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird through the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked; I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you, and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

.....

Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory

Song-whistle And I'll Come To You

Chorus.â??O WHISTLE, an' I'll come to ye, my lad,
O whistle, an' I'll come to ye, my lad,
Tho' father an' mother an' a' should gae mad,
O whistle, an' I'll come to ye, my lad.
.....

Robert Burns

The Iliad: Book 13

Now when Jove had thus brought Hector and the Trojans to the
ships, he left them to their never-ending toil, and turned his keen
eyes away, looking elsewhither towards the horse-breeders of Thrace,
the Mysians, fighters at close quarters, the noble Hippemolgi, who
.....

Homer

The New Hawaiian Girl

EXPLANATORY

Kamehameha First, of the Hawaiian Islands, conquered his
foes in a great battle, driving them over the high mountain
.....

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Betty

You can see the sandhills from our new room.
Butterflies
live in the sandhills
and lizards
.....

Lola Ridge