Short Poems

Slay fowl and beast; pluck clean the vine,
Prepare the feast and pearl the wine.
Bring on the best! Bring on the bard,
Bring on the rest. Let nought retard
Nor yet distress with putrid breath,
My new mistress, My Lady Death.

Trust thy ship unto the wind,
Not thy soule to woman kind;
For the Sea is safer far
Then the faiths of women are.
Good amongst them there is none,
But should there happen such a one,
Sure it must be some strange fate
Good can of a bad create.

Sir Drake, whom well the world's end knew
Which thou didst compass round,
And whom both poles of heaven once saw,
Which north and south do bound,
The stars above would make thee known,
If men here silent were;
The Sun himself cannot forget
His fellow traveller.

When I had writ this, then the Lord said further concerning the King

Woe to England , when the Kings Life is gone!
All may pray that no hurt to him be done.
Now the Plot is found out, all yet is not past,
For it's well, if that his life do escape at last,
He now warning hath, if he will notice of it take,
We may pray hard for his Life, for Englands sake!

Sing hey! Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly,
For friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let's all be jolly.

Since we can die but once, what matters it,
If rope or garter, poison, pistol, sword,
Slow-wasting sickness, or the sudden burst
Of valve arterial in the noble parts,
Curtail the miseries of human life?
Though varied is the cause, the effect's the same:
All to one common dissolution tends.

A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath;
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their crest 'gainst a sky green-gold;
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown

Siamese twins: one, maddened by
The other's moral bigotry,
Resolved at length to misbehave
And drink them both into the grave.

Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.
He lags the long bright morning through,
Ever so tired of nothing to do;
He moons and mopes the livelong day,
Nothing to think about, nothing to say;
Up to bed with his candle to creep,
Too tired to yawn, too tired to sleep:
Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.

There was an old person of Sidon,
Who bought a small pony to ride on;
But he found him too small to leap over a wall,
So he walked, that old person of Sidon.