Lines:"...glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens"

Poem:The Red Wheelbarrow (1923), William Carlos Williams

Lines:"...Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!..."

Poem:The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Oscar Wilde

Lines:"...Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance..."

Poem:I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud/Daffodils (1807), William Wordsworth

Lines:"The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;..."

Poem:Dover Beach (1867), Matthew Arnold

Lines:"...This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

Poem:The Hollow Men (1925), T. S. Eliot

Lines:"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,..."

Poem:Ozymandias (1818), P. B. Shelley

Lines:"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world..."

Poem:Concord Hymn (1837), Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lines:"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich 3 licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;..."

Poem:The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)

Lines:"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light!"

Poem:A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), Edna St. Vincent Millay

Lines:"...Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Poem:Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819), John Keats

Lines:"I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine..."

Poem:Poetry, Marianne Moore

Lines:"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I..."

Poem:The Road Not Taken (1916), Robert Frost

Lines:"...In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,..."

Poem:To a Mouse (1785), Robert Burns

Lines:"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;..."

Poem:Holy Sonnets, Sonnet 10 (1633), John Donne

Lines:"...The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!..."

Poem:Pippa Passes (1841), Robert Browning

Lines:"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come..."

Poem:Funeral Blues/Stop all the Clocks (1938), W. H. Auden

Lines:"...All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrage..."

Poem:Jabberwocky from Through the Looking Glass (1872), Lewis Carroll

Lines:"It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of..."

Poem:Annabel Lee (1849), Edgar Allan Poe

Lines:"...I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all..."

Poem:In Memorium A.H.H. (1850), Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Lines:"...Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way..."

Poem:Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1749), Thomas Gray

Lines:"...The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun."

Poem:The Song of Wandering Aengus (1899), William Butler Yeats

Lines:"...Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light..."

Poem:Do not go gentle into that good night (1951), Dylan Thomas

Lines:"...Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?"

Poem:Hero and Leander (c. 1592), Christopher Marlowe

Lines:"...If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,..."

Poem:If- (1895), Rudyard Kipling

Lines:"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;...

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;..."

Poem:To His Coy Mistress (1681), Andrew Marvell

Lines:"...Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,..."

Poem:Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Lines:"A free bird leaps on the back
Of the wind and floats downstream
Till the current ends and dips his wing
In the orange suns rays
And dares to claim the sky..."

Poem:I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

Lines:"...That's newly sprung in June;
O my Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune..."

Poem:A Red, Red Rose (1794), Robert Burns

Lines:"...like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;..."

Poem:She Walks in Beauty (1814), Lord Byron

Lines:"Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of a blackbird..."

Poem:Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917), Wallace Stevens

Lines:"...In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo..."

Poem:The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), T. S. Eliot

Lines:"...And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind..."

Poem:Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), Shel Silverstein

Lines:"...A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:..."

Poem:An Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope

Lines:"...The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,..."

Poem:Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923), Robert Frost

Lines:"...No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise."

Poem:Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1742), Thomas Gray

Lines:"...To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry -
This Traverse may the poorest take..."

Poem:There is no Frigate like a Book (1286) (1924), Emily Dickinson

Lines:"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art..."

Poem:To a Skylark (1820), P. B. Shelley

Lines:"...Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below..."

Poem:In Flanders Fields (1915), John McCrae

Lines:"...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?..."

Poem:The Tyger from Songs of Experience (1794), William Blake

Lines:"...Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--
And then run?..."

Poem:Dream Deferred (1951), Langston Hughes

Lines:"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain..."

Poem:The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot

Lines:"...Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n."

Poem:Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton

Lines:"...We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We..."

Poem:We Real Cool (1959), Gwendolyn Brooks

Lines:"...And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,..."

Poem:Sea-Fever (1902), John Masefield

Lines:"...Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea..."

Poem:Kubla Khan (1797), Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lines:"For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have..."

Poem:Crossing the Bar (1889), Alfred Tennyson

Lines:"...The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul..."

Poem:I Sing the Body Electric from Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman

Lines:"... In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note..."

Poem:The Owl and the Pussycat (1871), Edward Lear

Lines:"Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:..."

Poem:Chicago (1916), Carl Sandburg

Lines:"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace..."

Poem:Sonnet 43 from Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Lines:"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage:..."

Poem:To Althea from Prison (1648), Richard Lovelace

Lines:"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,..."

Poem:The Second Coming (1920), William Butler Yeats

Lines:"Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem..."

Poem:The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1922), Wallace Stevens

Lines:"...Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,..."

Poem:The Raven (1845), Edgar Allan Poe

Lines:"...At length did cross an Albatross
Through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name..."

Poem:The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lines:"Gather ye rosebuds while may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying..."

Poem:To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time (1648), Robert Herrick

Lines:"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine..."

Poem:Song:To Celia (1616), Ben Jonson

Lines:"...Whom the gods love, die young' was said of yore,
And many deaths do they escape by this:
The death of friends and that which slays even more,
The death of friendship, love, youth, all that is,..."

Poem:Don Juan (1818-23), Lord Byron

Lines:"...Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;..."

Poem:Paul Revere's Ride (1860), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Lines:"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,..."

Poem:Howl (1955), Allen Ginsberg

Lines:"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing..."

Poem:Endymion (1818), John Keats

Lines:"Is not thilke the mery moneth of May,
When love lads masken in fresh aray?..."

(hint: written before the epic The Faerie Queene)

Poem:The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), Edmund Spenser

Lines:"I never saw a ___ ___,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one."

Poem:The Purple Cow (1895), Gelett Burgess

Lines:"Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,..."

Poem:The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854), Alfred, Lord Tennyson