1. Yeats Died Saturday In France - written by Delmore Schwartz
Published in 1939. Read 1012 times on American Poems.

Yeats died Saturday in France.
Freedom from his animal
Has come at last in alien Nice,
His heart beat separate from his will:
He knows at last the old abyss
Which always faced his staring face.

No ability, no dignity
Can fail him now who trained so... (Read full poem)

The yard half a yard, 
half a lake blue as a corpse. 
The lake will tell things you long to hear: 
get away from here. 
Three o'clock. Dry leaves rat-tat like maracas. 

Whisky-colored grass
breaks at every step and trees 
are slowly realizing they... (Read full poem)

3. The Lake. To-- - written by Edgar Allan Poe
Read 3716 times on American Poems.

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less-
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown... (Read full poem)

Fair isle, that from the fairest of all flowers,
Thy gentlest of all gentle names dost take!
How many memories of what radiant hours
At sight of thee and thine at once awake!
How many scenes of what departed bliss!
How many thoughts of what... (Read full poem)

5. The Quest - written by Denise Levertov
Read 904 times on American Poems.

High, hollowed in green
above the rocks of reason
lies the crater lake
whose ice the dreamer breaks
to find a summer season.

'He will plunge like a plummet down
far into hungry tides'
they cry, but as the sea
climbs to a lunar magnet
so... (Read full poem)

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, 
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag, 
And the bright... (Read full poem)

7. Easter Week - written by Joyce Kilmer
From Main Street and Other Poems. Published in 1917. Read 2394 times on American Poems.

(In memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett)

("Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.")

William Butler Yeats.

"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave."
Then, Yeats, what gave that Easter... (Read full poem)

The fishermen on Lake Michigan, sometimes,
For kicks, they spit two hunks of bait on hooks
At either end of a single length of line
And toss that up among the scavenging gulls,

Who go for it so fast that often two of them
Make the connection before... (Read full poem)

9. Death Of The Kapowsin Tavern - written by Richard Hugo
From Death of the Kapowsin Tavern. Published in 1965. Read 485 times on American Poems.

I can't ridge it back again from char.
Not one board left. Only ash a cat explores
and shattered glass smoked black and strung
about from the explosion I believe
in the reports. The white school up for sale
for years, most homes abandoned to the... (Read full poem)

Near where I live there is a lake
As blue as blue can be, winds make
It dance as they go blowing by.
I think it curtseys to the sky.
It's just a lake of lovely flowers
And my Mamma says they are ours;
But they are not like those we grow
To be... (Read full poem)

11. The Harbor - written by Carl Sandburg
From Chicago Poems. Published in 1912. Read 8352 times on American Poems.

PASSING through huddled and ugly walls
By doorways where women
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city's edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves... (Read full poem)

In slack times visit I the violent dead
and pick their awful brains. Most seem to feel
nothing is secret more
to my disdain I find, when we who fled
cherish the knowings of both worlds, conceal
more, beat on the floor,

where Bhain is... (Read full poem)

13. Womanly Qualms - written by Ellis Parker Butler
From Leslie’s Monthly. Published in 1902. Read 473 times on American Poems.

When I go rowing on the lake,
    I long to be a man;
I’ll give my Sunday frock to have
    A callous heart like Dan.

I love the ripple of the waves
    When gliding o’er the deep,
But when I see the cruel ours,
    I close my eyes and... (Read full poem)

A shallow lake, with many waterbirds,
especially egrets: I was showing Mother around,
An extraordinary vivid dream
of Betty & Douglass, and Don—his mother's estate
was on the grounds of a lunatic asylum.
He showed me around.

A... (Read full poem)

15. The Black Swan - written by Randall Jarrell
From The Complete Poems. Published in 1969. Read 1773 times on American Poems.

When the swans turned my sister into a swan
 I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
 A swan's red beak; and the beak would open
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the... (Read full poem)

lights in the twilight,
lights of Solvay over the expanse of frozen snow-covered
     lake,
orange lights of the refineries,
yellow and green and red lights of the neon along the
     strip,
lights as if undersea, the argon just coming to... (Read full poem)

17. The Big Heart - written by Anne Sexton
Read 4541 times on American Poems.

"Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold." - From an essay by W. B. Yeats 

Big heart, 
wide as a watermelon, 
but wise as birth, 
there is so much abundance 
in the people I have: 
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise, 
Joan, Marie, Dawn,... (Read full poem)

LISTEN a while, the moon is a lovely woman, a lonely woman, lost in a silver dress, lost in a circus rider’s silver dress.
  
Listen a while, the lake by night is a lonely woman, a lovely woman, circled with birches and pines mixing their green... (Read full poem)

19. Dear Reader - written by Billy Collins
Read 3417 times on American Poems.

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs 
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing 
in the doorway of these... (Read full poem)

Thou born to sip the lake or spring,
Or quaff the waters of the stream,
Why hither come on vagrant wing?--
Does Bacchus tempting seem--
Did he, for you, the glass prepare?--
Will I admit you to a share?

Did storms harrass or foes perplex,
Did wasps... (Read full poem)

21. To One Departed - written by Edgar Allan Poe
Read 3018 times on American Poems.

Seraph! thy memory is to me
Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea -
Some ocean vexed as it may be
With storms; but where, meanwhile,
Serenest skies continually
Just o'er that one bright island smile. 
For 'mid the earnest... (Read full poem)

Beloved! amid the earnest woes
That crowd around my earthly path-
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose)-
My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.

And thus thy memory is... (Read full poem)

23. The End Of The Weekend - written by Anthony Hecht
Read 1791 times on American Poems.

A dying firelight slides along the quirt
Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans
Against my father's books. The lariat
Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans
Fingers a page of Captain Marriat
Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We... (Read full poem)

O generation of the thoroughly smug
        and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
        and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am... (Read full poem)

25. Blue - written by Reginald Shepherd
Read 1034 times on American Poems.

See my colors fall apart? Green
to yellow with just one shade gone,
the changing tints of your sun-struck eyes,
if there were sun. Today the prism held to mine’s

a prison, locking in the light. In one of those mirrors
the colors are true. In one of... (Read full poem)