Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not…
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882 Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was…
William Wordsworth, 1770-1850 The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that…
If I had a magic carpet or a giant set of wings, I’d leave this world of parking lots and noise and motor cars, And I’d fly to far off places, and I’d see a million things, And I’d sleep beneath a canopy of fifty million stars. So play a…
Strickland Gillilan (1869-1954) I had a mother who read to me Sagas of pirates who scoured the sea, Cutlasses clenched in their yellow teeth, “Blackbirds” stowed in the hold beneath I had a Mother who read me lays Of ancient and gallant and golden days; Stories of Marmion and Ivanhoe,…
by Ernest Dowson Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long. –Horace They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the…
by Alfred Lord Tennyson I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorps, a little town, And half a hundred bridges.…
by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842 Part I On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And through the field the road runs by To many-towered Camelot; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies…
by Robert Southey, 1802 No stir in the air, no stir in the sea, The ship was still as she could be, Her sails from heaven received no motion, Her keel was steady in the ocean. Without either sign or sound of their shock The waves flow’d over the Inchcape…
by Robert Frost, 1922 Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods…