EVEN as the sun with purple-colour’d face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laugh’d to scorn; Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo him. ‘Thrice-fairer than myself,’ thus she began, ‘The field’s […]
Category: Poetry
William Shakespeare – To the Queen
William Langland – Piers Plowman
Virgil – The Aeneid of Virgil (I-VI)
Thomas Hill – Christmas, and Poems on Slavery for Christmas
Hark! What glad voices are joyfully ringing Through the stillness of morn o’er the yet sleeping earth! ‘T is a chorus of angels in harmony singing, “The Saviours of sinners to-day has his birth. “Glory to God in the highest be given, Peace and good be proclaimed upon earth, Jesus, Messiah anointed of Heaven, To-day […]
Kahlil Gibran – The Prophet
John Milton – Paradise Regained
WHO erewhile the happy Garden sung By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing Recovered Paradise to all mankind, By one man’s firm obedience fully tried Through all temptation, and the Tempter foiled In all his wiles, defeated and repulsed, And Eden raised in the waste Wilderness. Thou Spirit, who led’st this glorious Eremite Into the […]
Howard Phillips Lovecraft – The Allowable Rhyme
Sed ubi plira nitent in carmine, non ego paucis Offendar maculis. —Horace The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the […]
Homer – The Iliad of Homer
Whether a translation of Homer may be best executed in blank verse or in rhyme, is a question in the decision of which no man can find difficulty, who has ever duly considered what translation ought to be, or who is in any degree practically acquainted with those very different kinds of versification. I will […]
Homer – The Iliad & The Odyssey
Gilbert Keith Chesterton – The Wild Knight and Other Poems
Elias Lonnrot – The Kalevala
THE following translation was undertaken from a desire to lay before the English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology comprised in The Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns. A brief description of this peculiar people, and of their ethical, linguistic, social, and religious life, seems to be called for here […]
Edgar Allan Poe – The Raven
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and […]
Clark Ashton Smith – Odes and Sonnets
This Rome, that was the toil of many men, The consummation of laborious yearsFulfilment’s crown to visions of the dead, And image of the wide desire of kings Is made my darkling dream’s effulgency, Fuel of vision, brief embodiment Of wandering will and wastage of the strong Fierce ecstasy of one tremendous hour, When ages […]
Victorian Songs; Lyrics of the Affections and Nature – Gosse, Garrett, and Garrett
N O species of poetry is more ancient than the lyrical, and yet none shows so little sign of having outlived the requirements of human passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and the freshness of girlhood expand, is seized with a […]
Theocritus, translated into English Verse – Theocritus
I had intended translating all or nearly all these Idylls into blank verse, as the natural equivalent of Greek or of Latin hexameters; only deviating into rhyme where occasion seemed to demand it. But I found that other metres had their special advantages: the fourteen-syllable line in particular has that, among others, of containing about […]
The Wind Among the Reeds – W. B. Yeats
THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare; Caolte tossing his burning hair And Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream. The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our […]
The Waste Land – T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, […]
The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson – Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson
I stood upon the Mountain which o’erlooks The narrow seas, whose rapid interval Parts Afric from green Europe, when the Sun Had fall’n below th’ Atlantick, and above The silent Heavens were blench’d with faery light, Uncertain whether faery light or cloud, Flowing Southward, and the chasms of deep, deep blue Slumber’d unfathomable, and the […]
The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses – Robert W. Service
The lonely sunsets flare forlorn Down valleys dreadly desolate; The lordly mountains soar in scorn As still as death, as stern as fate. The lonely sunsets flame and die; The giant valleys gulp the night; The monster mountains scrape the sky, Where eager stars are diamond-bright. So gaunt against the gibbous moon, Piercing the silence […]