Psalm 23 is a six-verse song of trust, headed in the Hebrew Psalter as a psalm of David and placed in the first book of Psalms, between the anguished cry of Psalm 22 and the processional hymn of Psalm 24. Its speaker never asks for anything.
Genre
Poetry
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
Cædmon's Hymn is a nine-line poem in praise of God the Creator and the oldest surviving English poem whose maker is known by name. It survives because Bede told its story in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731.
The Dream of the Rood is the oldest dream-vision poem in English and one of the great devotional poems of the early Middle Ages. A sleepless narrator, at midnight while others rest, sees a vast tree rising into the sky, wrapped in light and set with gold and jewels.
The Poetic Edda is the collection of anonymous Old Norse poems about the gods and heroes of the North, preserved chiefly in the Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, written about 1270. The library text is the complete translation by Henry Adams Bellows, published in 1923 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which renders thirty-five poems in alliterative verse and adds a general introduction, an introductory note to each poem and extensive notes.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
Sonnet 116 is Shakespeare's most famous definition of love, and it works by saying first what love is not. The speaker opens with a phrase borrowed from the church's marriage service: he will not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.
Shakespeare's Sonnets is a sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems, nearly all in the form now named after him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg, in iambic pentameter. The sequence has no plot in the ordinary sense, but readers since the eighteenth century have traced a loose story.
Death, be not proud is one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, a group of religious sonnets probably written around 1609-1610, circulated in manuscript among friends and printed only after his death in the Poems of 1633. In Herbert Grierson's 1912 edition, followed here, it is Holy Sonnet X; the numbering differs among manuscripts and early printings.
The Collar is a 36-line lyric from George Herbert's The Temple, the book of religious poems published in 1633, a few months after his death. Its speaker, a man bound to God's service and often read as a priest like Herbert himself, rises in revolt against that service.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
Milton's sonnet on his blindness is a fourteen-line argument between a complaining heart and a corrective voice. It was written in the early 1650s, after Milton, then in his forties and serving the Commonwealth government, had lost his sight entirely.
Gray's Elegy is a meditation spoken at dusk in a village churchyard. In the opening stanzas the curfew bell rings, the cattle wind home, the ploughman plods away, and the speaker is left alone with the darkening fields, an owl complaining from the ivied tower, and the grassy mounds where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The Tyger is the most famous lyric in William Blake's Songs of Experience, which he etched, printed and hand-coloured in 1794 and issued together with the earlier Songs of Innocence under the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. It is the counterpart of The Lamb in Innocence, where a child asks a lamb who made it and answers that its maker is the gentle Lamb of God.
Tintern Abbey, as the poem is usually called, is a meditation in blank verse spoken on the banks of the River Wye a few miles upstream of the ruined Cistercian abbey on the border of England and Wales. Its first title dates it to 13 July 1798, when Wordsworth was on a walking tour with his sister Dorothy, and it was printed that autumn as the last poem in Lyrical Ballads.
Ozymandias is a fourteen-line sonnet about a ruined statue of an Egyptian king in the desert, and it has become the best-known English poem on the vanity of earthly power. Shelley wrote it in late 1817, in a friendly sonnet-writing contest with his friend Horace Smith on the same subject, and Leigh Hunt printed it in The Examiner on 11 January 1818.
In the Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats addresses an ancient vase carved with figures and asks what it can tell us that living speech cannot. The first stanza piles up names for the urn, a still unravished bride of quietness, a foster-child of silence and slow time, a sylvan historian, and then a rush of questions about the scene on its side: men or gods, reluctant maidens, mad pursuit, pipes and timbrels, wild ecstasy.
Ulysses is a seventy-line dramatic monologue in blank verse that Tennyson wrote in October 1833, within weeks of learning that his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna. He published it in his two-volume Poems of 1842.
My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue of 56 lines, first published in Robert Browning's Dramatic Lyrics in 1842 and headed Ferrara. The speaker is a Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, and his listener, who never speaks, is an envoy sent by a Count to arrange the Duke's marriage to the Count's daughter.
The Raven is a narrative poem of eighteen six-line stanzas in which a grieving student, alone at midnight in December, is visited by a talking bird that can say only one word. It appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, ahead of its printing in The American Review, and made Poe famous almost overnight.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
Paul Revere's Ride is a narrative ballad that tells how a Boston silversmith carried the alarm of a British march into the Massachusetts countryside on the night of 18 April 1775. It opens like a story told aloud, Listen, my children, and notes that hardly anyone still alive remembers the day.
Because I could not stop for Death is Emily Dickinson's most famous poem about dying, written in Amherst around 1862-1863, the years of her greatest productivity and of the Civil War. It was not printed until 1890, four years after her death, when Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson included it in the first collection of her Poems under the title The Chariot.
O Captain! My Captain!
God's Grandeur is an Italian sonnet that Hopkins wrote in February and March 1877 at St Beuno's College in North Wales, where he was studying theology in the final months before his ordination as a Jesuit priest. Like most of his poems it went unpublished in his lifetime; Robert Bridges printed it in 1918, almost thirty years after the poet's death.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) is Robert Louis Stevenson's book of poems spoken in a child's voice: rising by yellow candle-light in winter, watching rain fall on field and sea, playing at pirates, noticing a shadow, and blessing the world's abundance in the two lines of Happy Thought. Written while Stevenson often lived under the discipline of illness, the poems remember gardens, nurseries, and indoor days with affection rather than irony.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
If— is a father's counsel to his son on what it takes to become a man, delivered as one long conditional sentence. Kipling printed it in Rewards and Fairies (1910), a book of linked stories for children in which poems sit between the tales; If— follows the story Brother Square-Toes.
Lepanto is G. K. Chesterton's ballad of the naval battle fought on 7 October 1571 in the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece, where the galleys of the Holy League, assembled by Pope Pius V and led by Don John of Austria, defeated the Ottoman fleet. Chesterton published it in The Eye-Witness in October 1911 and collected it in his Poems of 1915.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
In Flanders Fields is a fifteen-line poem written in early May 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the battle in which German forces first used chlorine gas on the Western Front. By the traditional account, McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed by a shell on 2 May, in a small cemetery near his dressing station beside the Yser canal, where wild poppies were blooming among the graves.
The Road Not Taken is a twenty-line lyric in four five-line stanzas, first printed in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and placed by Frost, in italics, at the head of his third book, Mountain Interval (1916). It is among the most quoted American poems and among the most often misread.
The Real Mother Goose (1916) gathers the nursery rhymes English-speaking children have sung for centuries—Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, Old Mother Goose, Little Bo-Peep, and scores of others—into one illustrated volume by Blanche Fisher Wright. The rhymes themselves are traditional: short, strongly metered verses that stick in the ear and the memory.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
The Second Coming is a twenty-two-line poem in two verse paragraphs in which Yeats imagines the end of the Christian era and the birth of something terrible to replace it. He wrote it in January 1919, in the months after the First World War, with the Russian Revolution and its violence recent and Ireland moving toward its own war of independence.
The Waste Land is a poem of 433 lines in five parts, dedicated to Ezra Pound and prefaced by a Latin and Greek epigraph from Petronius in which the Sibyl of Cumae, shrivelled in a jar, says she wants to die. Part I, The Burial of the Dead, opens with April as the cruellest month, stirring memory and desire in a dead land.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Journey of the Magi is a dramatic monologue in which one of the wise men of Matthew 2, now old, remembers the journey to Bethlehem and asks what it meant. T. S. Eliot wrote it in 1927, the year he was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, and Faber and Gwyer published it that August as the eighth of its Ariel Poems, small illustrated pamphlets sold as Christmas cards, with a drawing by E. McKnight Kauffer.