Poem Texts

• Léonie Adams: A selection of poems
• Anonymous cat poem, Pangur Bán: two translations by Frank O'Connor and Eavan Boland from the Old Irish
• Anonymous Irish Street Ballad"Finnegan's Wake"
• Anonymous 18th German love song
• Apollinaire, Le Pont Mirabeau plus translation.
• W. H. Auden:
  • "The Two"
  • "O What Is That Sound". Dialogue poem which turns fear of contemporary 1930s totalitarianism into nursery-scary fun.
  • On being a poet, from "The Cave of Making, In Memoriam Louis MacNeice"
  • "Stop all the clocks"
• Hilaire Belloc, "Tarantella"
• John Berryman, "Dream Song 14" ("Life, friends, is boring")
• John Berryman, "Dream Song 4" ("Filling her compact and delicious body")
• Elizabeth Bishop, "The Armadillo"
• Emily Bronte, "No Coward Soul Is Mine"
• Bronte, "Remembrance"
• Robert Browning, "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning"
• Charles Bukowski Two Letters on literary and social matters
• Tom Clark, "Artificial Light"
• Arthur Hugh Clough, "Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth"
• Padraic Colum, "I Shall Not Die for Thee", together with the Irish original, a literal translation, and a second verse translation by Frank O'Connor
•  Concrete poetry -- some samples of visual poems
• Cid Corman, Short poems


• Robert Creeley
  • "Ballad of the Despairing Husband" Tough talking lyricism.
  • "I Know a Man"-- Creeley as hipster.
  • "The Conspiracy" 
• E. E. Cummings
  • "Buffalo Bill" 
  • "Next to of course God America . . . "
  • "ygUDuh"  [With visitors' comments]
• Irish Curses by Synge and others
  
• John Donne
  • "The Apparition" (old spelling)
  • "The Flea" (old spelling)
  • "The Funerall" (old spelling)
  • "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward" (old spelling)
  • "Hymn to God the Father"
• Michael Drayton, "Since there's no help . . . " Breaking up is hard to do.
• Robert Duncan and Shelley, "Arethusa" Which poet has the better ear?
• William Empson, "Homage to the British Museum" A modern Metaphysical poet
• Edward Field Winsome lyrics from Pop Culture materials
  • "Curse of the Cat Woman
  • Three Frankenstein poems
  • "Unwanted"
• Robert Frost [At the insistence of the copyright holder, access is restricted to students in my classes]
  • "To Earthward" A surprising glimpse into Frost's psyche.
  • "Fire and Ice" 
  • "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
• Federico Garcia Lorca El Balcón
  
• Théophile Gautier, "Carmen" -- one of the poems on which T. S. Eliot modelled his quatrain poems of Poems, 1920.
• Barnabe Googe "Of Money"
• Robert Graves
  • "She Tells her Love . . . " Magical.
  • "Down, Wanton, Down" A kind of a riddle . . . you're invited to submit your solution.
  • "Counting the Beats" Hypnotic love poem
• Thomas Gray, "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" 
The great commonplaces rehearsed

H - R

• Mark Halliday, "Population"
• Thomas Hardy
  • "Transformations"
  • "I Look Into My Glass" 
  • "Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave?" Black humor
• Seamus Heaney Nobel Prize winner from Ireland. [At the insistence of the copyright holder, access is restricted to students in my classes]
  • Translation of middle English "The Names of the Hare"
  • "The Fire Gaze"
  • "Tollund" (1994)
• George Herbert, "The Collar" A priest in passionate rebellion.
• Herbert , "The Collar" in its original spelling version


• Robert Herrick (Remember "The Dirty Vicar" in the Monty Python television show? This vicar is naughty but memorably lyrical.)
  • "Delight in Disorder"  Inflammatory paradoxes.
  • "The Vine" -- the vicar's erotic dream
  • Three more by Herrick  -- "Upon Julia's Clothes" and two poignant epitaphs
• A. D. Hope, Five poems A fine poet from Australia.
• A. E. Housman, "Eight o'clock"  Not exactly a riddle, but a poem you have to "solve," in a sense.
• Randall Jarrell, "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" Sears the memory.
  
• Ben Jonson
  • Two epitaphs: "Epitaph on Elizabeth, L.H." and "On My First Daughter" -- Classical restraint but deep feeling.
  • "Simplex Munditiis" or "Still to be neat . . ." Might be read as a rebuttal to Herrick's "Delight in Disorder".
  • "My Picture Left in Scotland" or the complaint of the fat man in love.
• Patrick Kavanagh -- two poems by a modern Irish poet revered by recent generations.


• Thomas Kinsella
  • "At the Western Ocean's Edge"
  • "Scylla and Charybdis"
  • "Chrysalides"
  • "Mirror in February" 
  • Kinsella's "The Poet Egan O'Rahilly, Homesick in Old Age," together with an O'Rahilly poem in Irish and a translation by Kinsella.
• Rudyard Kipling, "If . . ." -- a memorable poem, but not in high repute in academic circles.


• Philip Larkin [At the insistence of the copyright holder, access is restricted to students in my classes]
  • "This Be the Verse"
  • "I Remember, I Remember" (from another web site)
  • "Talking in Bed" The last lines will make you squirm.
• D. H. Lawrence
  • "The Piano" (early version)
  • Five tortoise poems
  • Violets -- early and revised versions
  • Snake -- probably DHL's best known poem
• Longfellow, Sonnet "Mezzo Camin"
• Lorca -- See Garcia Lorca above.
• Antonio Machado, "Campo"
• Louis MacNeice, "Sunlight on the Garden" 
• Edna Millay, "What lips ..." Daringly frank sex poem.
• John Montague, "All Legendary Obstacles" Another contemporary Irish lyrical voice.
• The works of Julia A. Moore, Michigan's own and ineffably awful poet.
• Marianne Moore, "A Grave" Miss Moore's mind moves fast and goes deep.
• Paul Muldoon [At the insistence of the copyright holder, access is restricted to students in my classes]
  • "Symposium" Language games.
• Thomas Nash, "Litany in Time of Plague" [an old-spelling text] Haauntingly somber.
• Frank O'Connor's "I Shall Not Die" -- a translation of an Irish poem also famously translated by Padraic Colum.
• George Oppen, "Psalm"
• Kenneth Patchen, "Fall of the Evening Star."
• Marge Piercy, "Beauty I Would Suffer for" (An enthusiastic poem about food!)
• Sylvia Plath [At the insistence of the copyright holder, access is restricted to students in my classes]
  • "Mirror"
  • "Frog Autumn"
• Francis Ponge, l'Orange -- one the French poet's meditations on ordinary objects (with translation)
• Ezra Pound, "Sestina: Altaforte" For anyone who thinks poetry is all about flowers and butterflies ...
• Pound / Li Po, "The River-Merchant's Wife"
• Blind Raftery the Irish folk poet. 
• John Crowe Ransom, "Blue Girls"
• Charles Reznikoff -- two poems? or two versions of the same poem? 
• Rainer Maria Rilke , "Torso of an Archaic Apollo" in German and English translation.
• Mary Robinson, "The Camp" Nineteenth-century woman poet recently being re-read.
• Theodore Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz"   Memories of a rough father -- but not a poem about child abuse!
• Christina Rossetti, "Up-Hill"

S - Z

• Walter Scott, "Young Lochinvar" Jingly meter has its pleasures!
• Walter Scott,"Proud Maisie" A literary ballad, somber but bracing.
  
• William Shakespeare
  • Sonnet 71, "No longer mourn . . ." Is the speaker posing?
  • Sonnet 138, "When my love swears . . ." in the spelling of the first collected edition (1609). Shakespeare at his most cynical.
  • "When my love swears . . ." in an earlier version, published in 1599
  • "Th'expence of Spirit . . ." Sonnet 129 in the spelling of the first edition of 1609
• Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias" together with Horace Smith, another Ozymandias poem


• James Simmons: another poet from Northern Ireland, born 1933
  • "Art and Reality" -- witty and painful.
  • "John Donne" -- a scathing attack.
• Sir Philip Sidney, sestina, "Ye Goat-herd Gods"
• Wallace Stevens, "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" 
• Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man" 
• Anne Stevenson, "Re-reading Jane" -- on Jane Austen
• Paul Valéry, "Le cimetière marin", one of the greatest 20th century poems, with linked translation.
• Edmund Waller, "On My Lady Isabella Playing the Lute"
• Richard Wilbur, "In the Smoking Car"
• Richard Wilbur, "Shame"


• William Carlos Williams
  • "Après le bain"
  • "This is just to say"  A note on the refrigerator door . . .
  • "The Thing"  A sort of riddle -- with a poll of readers' solutions.
• Two poems by John Woods, for many decades a much-loved teacher of creative writing at WMU.
• William Wordsworth, "Upon Westminster Bridge" 
  
• William Butler Yeats
  • "For Anne Gregory"
  • "A Prayer for My Daughter"
  • "The Sorrow of Love" -- an early and a later revised version.
  • "The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner" -- an early and a later revised version.
  • "Meru" 
  • "Adam's Curse"

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Since 21 August 1996, this page has been visited  times. Last updated April 17, 2000. Comments and suggestions to Seamus Cooney