Famous Historian Poems by Famous Poets

• Best Historian Poems by Famous Poets
• Historian Poems by Members
• Best Historian Poems by Members
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Things and the Man

 Oh ye who hold the written clue
 To all save all unwritten things,
And, half a league behind, pursue
 The accomplished Fact with flouts and flings,
 Look! To your knee your baby brings
 The oldest tale since Earth began --
 The answer to your worryings:
 "Once on a time there was a Man."

He, single-handed, met and slew
 Magicians, Armies, Ogres,...Read more of this...

Ode on a Grecian Urn

THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness  
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time  
Sylvan historian who canst thus express 
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: 
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 5 
Of deities or mortals or of both  
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? 
What men or gods are these? What maidens...Read more of this...

To a Historian

 YOU who celebrate bygones! 
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races—the life that has
 exhibited itself; 
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and
 priests; 
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself, in his own
 rights, 
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom...Read more of this...

Richard Bone

 When I first came to Spoon River
I did not know whether what they told me
Was true or false.
They would bring me an epitaph
And stand around the shop while I worked
And say "He was so kind," "He was wonderful,"
"She was the sweetest woman," "He was a consistent Christian."
And I chiseled for them whatever they wished,
All in ignorance of its truth.
But...Read more of this...

Goliath and David

 (For D. C. T., Killed at Fricourt, March, 1916)


Yet once an earlier David took 
Smooth pebbles from the brook: 
Out between the lines he went 
To that one-sided tournament, 
A shepherd boy who stood out fine
And young to fight a Philistine 
Clad all in brazen mail. He swears 
That he’s killed lions, he’s killed bears, 
And those that scorn...Read more of this...

Wapentake

 To Alfred Tennyson 

Poet! I come to touch thy lance with mine;
Not as a knight, who on the listed field
Of tourney touched his adversary's shield
In token of defiance, but in sign
Of homage to the mastery, which is thine,
In English song; nor will I keep concealed,
And voiceless as a rivulet frost-congealed,
My admiration for thy verse divine.
Not of the howling dervishes...Read more of this...

Painted Head

 By dark severance the apparition head 
Smiles from the air a capital on no 
Column or a Platonic perhaps head 
On a canvas sky depending from nothing; 

Stirs up an old illusion of grandeur 
By tickling the instinct of heads to be 
Absolute and to try decapitation 
And to play truant from the body bush; 

But too happy and...Read more of this...

Tom Mays Death

 As one put drunk into the Packet-boat,
Tom May was hurry'd hence and did not know't.
But was amaz'd on the Elysian side,
And with an Eye uncertain, gazing wide,
Could not determine in what place he was,
For whence in Stevens ally Trees or Grass.
Nor where the Popes head, nor the Mitre lay,
Signs by which still he found and lost his way.
At last...Read more of this...

A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton

 Shall the great soul of Newton quit this earth, 
To mingle with his stars; and every muse,
Astonish'd into silence, shun the weight
Of honours due to his illustrious name?
But what can man?--Even now the sons of light,
In strains high-warbled to seraphic lyre,
Hail his arrival on the coast of bliss.
Yet am not I deterr'd, though high the theme,
And sung to harps...Read more of this...

Observation Car

 To be put on the train and kissed and given my ticket, 
Then the station slid backward, the shops and the neon lighting, 
Reeling off in a drunken blur, with a whole pound note in my pocket 
And the holiday packed with Perhaps. It used to be very exciting. 

The present and past were enough. I did not mind...Read more of this...

The Grey Eros

 WE are desert leagues apart;
 Time is misty ages now
Since the warmth of heart to heart
 Chased the shadows from my brow.


Oh, I am so old, meseems
 I am next of kin to Time,
The historian of her dreams
 From the long-forgotten prime.


You have come a path of flowers.
 What a way was mine to roam!
Many a fallen empire’s towers,
...Read more of this...

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