19th-20th Century Poetry

A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds."

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

“Again the guns disturbed the hour, / Roaring their readiness to avenge, / As far inland as Stourton Tower, / And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.”

Thomas Hardy - Channel Firing

“altar, sword, pen / Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, / Have forfeited their ancient English dower”

William Wordsworth - London, 1802

“Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan

“And fare thee weel, my only luve, / And fare thee weel awhile / And I will come again, my luve, / Though it were ten thousand mile.”

Robert Burns - A Red, Red Rose

“And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;”

Gerard Manley Hopkins - God’s Grandeur

“And I will love thee still, my dear, / Till a’ the seas gang dry.”

Robert Burns - A Red, Red Rose

“And many a skeleton shook his head. / ‘Instead of preaching forty year,’ / My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, / “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Thomas Hardy - Channel Firing

“And so I dare to hope, / Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first / I came among these hills; when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains,”

William Wordsworth - Tintern Abbey

“And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

“Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss!”

John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn

“Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?”

Thomas Gray - Elegy in a Country Churchyard

“Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!”

William Wordsworth - Westminister Bridge

“Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

William Blake - The Tyger

“Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, / The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”

Thomas Gray - Elegy in a Country Churchyard

“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion / Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, / Then reached the caverns measureless to man,”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan

“For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place / The floor may bear me far, / I hope to see my Pilot face to face / When I have cross’d the bar.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Crossing the Bar

“Gave thee clothing of delight, / Softest clothing wooly bright; / Gave thee such a tender voice / Making all the vales rejoice!”

William Blake - The Lamb

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:”

Gerard Manley Hopkins - God’s Grandeur

“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!”

William Wordsworth - The World is Too Much With Us

“He gave to Misery all he had, a tear / He gained from Heaven (‘Twas all he wished) a friend.”

Thomas Gray - Elegy in a Country Churchyard

“He is meek, and He is mild, / He became a little child.”

William Blake - The Lamb

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;”

John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn

“I am a part of all that I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams the that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Ulysses

“I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve; / What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!”

Robert Burns - To a Mouse

“I, a child, very old, over waves towards the house of maternity”

Walt Whitman - Facing West from California’s Shores

“I”m truly sorry Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union, / An’ justifies that ill opinion, / Which makes thee startle, / At me…”

Robert Burns - To a Mouse

“I’d rather be / A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; / So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, / Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;”

William Wordsworth - The World is Too Much With Us

“I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union.”

Robert Burns - To a Mouse

“In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes? / On what wings dare he aspire? / What the hand, dare seize the fire?”

William Blake - The Tyger

“Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, / I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, / the land of migrations, look afar,”

Walt Whitman - Facing West from California’s Shores

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias

“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: / What if my leaves are falling like its own! / The tumult of thy mighty harmonies”

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind

“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: / English hath need of thee: she is a fen / Of stagnant waters.”

William Wordsworth - London, 1802

“My favour at her breast, / The dropping of the daylight in the West, / The bough of cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule / She rode with round the terrace”

Robert Browning - My Last Duchess

“Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command. / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read”

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias

“Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, / (But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?)”

Walt Whitman - Facing West from California’s Shores

“Oh! raise us up, return to us again; / And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”

William Wordsworth - London, 1802

“Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— / Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”

Gerard Manley Hopkins - God’s Grandeur

“One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Ulysses

“Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet / Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity—”

Emily Dickinson - Because I could not stop for Death

“Sophocles long ago / Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery;”

Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach

“Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! / The present only toucheth thee.”

Robert Burns - To a Mouse

“Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me! / And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put out to sea,”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Crossing the Bar

“That night your great guns, unawares, / Shook all our coffins as we lay / And broke the chancel window-squares, / We thought it was the Judgement-day”

Thomas Hardy - Channel Firing

“The Carriage held but just Ourselves— / And Immortality.”

Emily Dickinson - Because I could not stop for Death

“The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) / And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, / How such a glance came there;”

Robert Browning - My Last Duchess

“The Eyes around—had wrung them dry— / And Breaths were fathering firm / For that last Onset”

Emily Dickinson - I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

“The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: / The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep / Moans round with many voices.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Ulysses

“The mountain, and deep and gloomy wood, / Their colors and their forms, were then to me / An appetite, a feeling, and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm, / by thought supplied,”

William Wordsworth - Tintern Abbey

“The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.”

Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach

“The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air— / Between the Heaves of Storm—”

Emily Dickinson - I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

“The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind>”

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind

“The winds that will be howling at all hours, / And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, / For this, for everything, we are out of tune;”

William Wordsworth - The World is Too Much With Us

“The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, / Each like a corpse within its grave, until / Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow”

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind

“These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild”

William Wordsworth - Tintern Abbey

“This city now doth, like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, / Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky;”

William Wordsworth - Westminister Bridge

“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!”

John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn

“Till the bridge you will need be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold; / Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.”

Walt Whitman - A Noiseless Patient Spider

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

“Twilight and evening bell, / And after that the dark! / And may there be no sadness of farewell, / When I embark;”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Crossing the Bar

“We paused before a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground— / The Roof was scarcely visible— / The Cornice—in the Ground—”

Emily Dickinson - Because I could not stop for Death

“Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan

“What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp / Dare its deadly terrors clasp?”

William Blake - The Tyger