Discover the captivating beauty of poetry

'Twixt kings and tyrants there's this difference known:
Kings seek their subjects' good, tyrants their own.

How long, great Poet, shall thy sacred lays
Provoke our wonder, and transcend our praise?
Can neither injuries of time, or age,
Damp thy poetic heat, and quench thy rage?
No so thy Ovid in his exile wrote,
Grief chill'd his breast,and check'd his rising thought:
Pensive and sad, his drooping Muse betrays
The Roman genius in its last decays.
Prevailing warmth has still thy mind possest,
And second youth is kindled in thy breast;
Thou mak'st the beauties of the Romans known,
And England boasts of riches not her own;
Thy lines have heighten'd Virgil's majesty,
And Horace wonders at himself in thee.
Thou teachest Persius to inform our isle
In smoother numbers, and a clearer style;
And Juvenal, instructed in thy page,
Edges his satire, and improves his rage,

Lush green the grass that grows between
The willows of the bottom-land;
Verged by the careless water, tall and green,
The brown-topped cat-tails stand.

The cows come gently here to browse,
Slow through the great-leafed sycamores;
You hear a dog bark from a low-roofed house
With cedars round its doors.

Then all is quiet as the wings
Of the high buzzard floating there;
Anon a woman's high-pitched voice that sings
An old camp-meeting air.

A flapping cock that crows; and then -
Heard drowsy through the rustling corn -
A flutter, and the cackling of a hen
Within a hay-sweet barn.

How still again! no water stirs;
No wind is heard; although the weeds
Are waved a little; and from silk-filled burrs
Drift by a few soft seeds.
...

When Robin Hood and Little John
Down a down, a down, a down,
Went o'er yon bank of broom,
Said Robin Hood to Little John,
"We have shot for many a pound:
Hey down, a down, a down.

"But I am not able to shoot one shot more,
My arrows will not flee;
But I have a cousin lives down below,
Please God, she will bleed me."

Now Robin is to fair Kirkley gone,
As fast as he can win;
But before he came there, as we do hear,
He was taken very ill.

And when that he came to fair Kirkley-hall,
He knocked all at the ring,
But none was so ready as his cousin herself
For to let bold Robin in.

"Will you please to sit down, cousin Robin," she said,
"And drink some beer with me?"
"No, I will neither eat nor drink,
Till I am blooded ...

    His fingers wake, and flutter up the bed.
    His eyes come open with a pull of will,
    Helped by the yellow may-flowers by his head.
    A blind-cord drawls across the window-sill . . .
    How smooth the floor of the ward is! what a rug!
    And who's that talking, somewhere out of sight?
    Why are they laughing? What's inside that jug?
    "Nurse! Doctor!" "Yes; all right, all right."

    But sudden dusk bewilders all the air--
    There seems no time to want a drink of water.
    Nurse looks so far away. And everywhere
    Music and roses burnt through crimson slaughter.
    Cold; cold; he's cold; and yet so hot:
    And there's no light to see the voices by--
    No time to dream, and ask--he knows not what.

One winter night, at half-past nine,
Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy,
I had come home, too late to dine,
And supper, with cigars and wine,
Was waiting in the study.

There was a strangeness in the room,
And Something white and wavy
Was standing near me in the gloom,
I took it for the carpet-broom
Left by that careless slavey.

But presently the Thing began
To shiver and to sneeze:
On which I said "Come, come, my man!
That's a most inconsiderate plan.
Less noise there, if you please!"

"I've caught a cold," the Thing replies,
"Out there upon the landing."
I turned to look in some surprise,
And there, before my very eyes,
A little Ghost was standing!

He trembled when he caught my eye,
And got behind a chair.
"...

The rising moon on the peaks was blending
Her silver light with the sunset glow,
When a swagman came as the day was ending
Along a path that he seemed to know.
But all the fences were gone or going,
The hand of ruin was everywhere;
The creek unchecked in its course was flowing,
For none of the old clay dam was there.

Here Time had been with his swiftest changes,
And husbandry had westward flown;
The cattle tracks in the rugged ranges
Were long ago with the scrub o’ergrown.
It must have needed long years to soften
The road, that as hard as rock had been;
The mountain path he had trod so often
Lay hidden now with a carpet green.

He thought at times from the mountain courses
He heard the sound of a bullock bell,
The distant gallop of stockme...

The kiss had been given and taken,
And gathered to many past:
It never could reawaken;
But you heard none say: "It's the last!"

The clock showed the hour and the minute,
But you did not turn and look:
You read no finis in it,
As at closing of a book.

But you read it all too rightly
When, at a time anon,
A figure lay stretched out whitely,
And you stood looking thereon.