Birthright

Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed
Because a summer evening passed;
And little Ariadne cried
That summer fancy fell at last
To dust; and young Verona died
When beauty's hour was overcast.

Theirs was the bitterness we know
Because the clouds of hawthorn keep
So short a state, and kisses go
To tombs unfathomably deep,
While Rameses and Romeo
And little Ariadne sleep.

John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater was an influential English poet and dramatist who played a significant role in the early 20th-century literary scene. His best-known works include a series of historical plays about Abraham Lincoln, while his poetry often explored themes of nature and human emotion. Drinkwater was also a prominent figure in the Georgian poetry movement, helping to shape modern English poetry. He contributed to various literary journals and was associated with the Dymock poets.

John Drinkwater

The Midlands

John Drinkwater, Simple Poetry

Olton Pools

John Drinkwater, Simple Poetry

Gold

John Drinkwater, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Acon And Rhodope

The Year's twelve daughters had in turn gone by,
Of measured pace tho' varying mien all twelve,
Some froward, some sedater, some adorn'd
For festival, some reckless of attire.
The snow had left the mountain-top; fresh flowers
Had withered in the meadow; fig and prune
Hung wrinkling; the last apple glow'd amid
Its freckled leaves; and weary oxen blinkt
Between the trodden corn and twisted vine,
Under whose bunches stood the empty crate,
To creak ere long beneath them carried home.
This was the season when twelve months before,
O gentle Hamadryad, true to love!
Thy mansion, thy dim mansion in the wood
Was blasted and laid desolate: but none
Dared violate its precincts, none dared pluck
The moss beneath it, which alone remain'd
Of what was thine.

...

Walter Savage Landor

A Man Young And Old

I

I(First Love)
Through nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.
But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.

II

I(Human Dignity)
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow we...

William Butler Yeats

The Bacchanal

Beside a cottage-door,
    Sang Ella at her wheel;
Ruthven rode o'er the moor,
    Down at her feet to kneel:
A spotted palfrey gay
    Came ambling at his side,
To bear the maid away
    As his affianced bride.

A high-born noble he,
    Of stately halls secure;
A low-born peasant she,
    Of parentage obscure.
How soft the honeyed words
    He breathes into her ears!--
The melody of birds!
    The music of the spheres!

With love her bosom swells,
    Which she would fain conceal--
Her eyes, like crystal wells,
    Its hidden depths reveal.
While liquid diamonds drip
    From feeling's fountain warm,
Flutters her scarlet lip--
    A rose-leaf in a storm!

As from an April sky
    The rain-clouds fli...

George Pope Morris

A Dream of Fair Women

I read, before my eyelids dropt their shade,
The Legend of Good Women, long ago
Sung by the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below;

Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.

And, for a while, the knowledge of his art
Held me above the subject, as strong gales
Hold swollen clouds from raining, tho my heart,
Brimful of those wild tales,

Charged both mine eyes with tears. In every land
I saw, wherever light illumineth,
Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand
The downward slope to death.

Those far-renowned brides of ancient song
Peopled the hollow dark, like burning stars,
And I heard sounds of ins...

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Burning Bush

From babyhood I have known the beauty of earth,
I learnt it, I think, in the strange months before birth,
I learnt it passing and passing by each moon
From the harvest month into my natal June.
My mother, the dear, the lovely I hardly knew,
Bearing me must have walked and wandered through
Stubble of silver or gold, as moon or sun
Lit earth in the days when my body was begun.
And then October with leaves splendid and blown
She watched with my little body a little grown,
And winter fell, and into our being passed
Firm frost and icy rivers and the blast
Of winds that on the iron clods of plough
Beat with an unseen charging. Then the bough
Of spring came green, and her glad body stirred
With a son's wombed leaping, and she heard
Songs of the air and woods and wate...

John Drinkwater

Do You Remember Once . . .

    I

Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces,
The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays
And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places,
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais?

The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters
Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned.
Out of the starry south provoking rumors brought us
Far promise of the spring already northward turned.

And breast drew near to breast, and round its soft desire
My arm uncertain stole and clung there unrepelled.
I thought that nevermore my heart would hover nigher
To the last flower of bliss that Nature's garden held.

There, in your beauty's sweet abandonment to pleasure,
The mute, half-open lips and tender, wondering ...

Alan Seeger