Free summaries
Poetry
281 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 1 of 6.
The Home Book of Verse
Burton Egbert Stevenson
The sense of the world is short, long and various the report, to love and be beloved; men and gods have not outlearned it. This collection gathers the echoes of that ancient, unlearned truth, inviting readers to witness the myriad ways the human heart has tried to name its own devotion.
India's Love Lyrics
Laurence Hope
The ache of a life spent longing for the impossible pulses through these verses, where desert suns and temple shadows frame an endless, restless pursuit of love that never finds its rest.
The flower and the leaf
Unknown
The world awakens in a rush of green, where hidden allegories of endurance and fragility play out in a meadow that defies the turning of the seasons.
Verses
Violet Jacob
The world is vast, yet held within the compass of a single, watchful heart. Between the quiet English garden and the burning plains of the East, these verses map the silent spaces where memory and longing meet.
Ash-Wednesday
T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
The aged eagle stills its wings, choosing to renounce the vanity of past power in exchange for the quiet, difficult labor of finding grace in a world grown small and dry.
Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul
Unknown
A collection of verse designed to fortify the spirit, this anthology offers a quiet sanctuary for those seeking moral clarity and inner resilience amidst the pressures of a busy world.
The Principles of English Versification
Paull F. (Paull Franklin) Baum
A poem can seem simple on the page and still hide a whole system of pulse, pause, and pressure beneath it. Here the mystery is not what verse says, but how English makes it move.
Lundy's Lane, and Other Poems
Duncan Campbell Scott
The past is a country of ghosts and glory, where the echoes of ancient wars and the whispers of the Canadian wilderness resolve into a single, aching meditation on the persistence of the soul.
Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore
HOOK A lyrical exploration of the soul’s longing for the divine, this work captures the universal dance between human imperfection and the infinite.
Samphire
John Cowper Powys
This collection of verse captures the sharp, cold air of the English countryside and the wild, lonely reaches of the human psyche. It is a work of jagged intensity, where the mundane world of piers and farmyards constantly threatens to tear open, revealing ancient gods and cosmic terrors beneath.
The gardener
Rabindranath Tagore
Love, longing, and the fleeting beauty of earthly existence intertwine in a quiet, luminous dialogue between the soul and the world.
Stray Birds
Rabindranath Tagore
Transient moments of natural beauty and quiet internal reflection coalesce into short, poetic epigrams that uncover profound spiritual truths embedded within the everyday world.
Maurine and Other Poems
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
In a world driven by ambition and noise, true mastery in art and life requires a total surrender of the self to love, sacrifice, and beauty.
A Cluster of Grapes: A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry
Unknown
An unexpected glimpse into early twentieth-century British poetry reveals a transitional world balancing between Victorian traditions and modern anxieties.
Wings of youth
Nancy Buckley
The path of early adulthood is charted here through a series of lyrical meditations, where the joys of romance and the ache of longing are transformed into verse. These poems celebrate the bright, fleeting nature of youth and the enduring search for connection.
In The Yule-Log Glow, Book IV
Harrison S. (Harrison Smith) Morris
A collection of classic verse and prose, this volume gathers the voices of centuries to celebrate the depth and tradition of the Christmas season. It serves as a literary hearth, warming the reader with both the solemnity of the Nativity and the rugged joy of midwinter festivities.
The poetry of pathos & delight
Coventry Patmore
The capacity for deep, enduring love is not a triumph of the will, but a quiet, fragile art that matures through the steady rhythms of a life shared.
Stories in Verse
Henry Abbey
This collection of narrative poems explores the intersections of romantic obsession, social injustice, and the thin, haunting line between reality and the supernatural. Each piece functions as a self-contained story, moving from the gritty poverty of city streets to the high-stakes political intrigue of distant courts.
Fifteen sonnets of Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca
HOOK The sonnet is a tiny vessel built for immense feeling, and these fifteen poems capture the eternal, shifting light of a love that long ago turned to shadow and memory.
Poems
Mary Baker Eddy
Poetry is the language of a soul reaching for the divine, reflecting a life of profound spiritual search and quiet, persistent hope. These verses capture the turning points of a century, mapping a journey from personal grief toward an unwavering trust in a higher, healing power.
Fruit-Gathering
Rabindranath Tagore
The harvest of a life is gathered not in the abundance of one’s store, but in the willingness to offer oneself entirely to the light. This collection of poems maps the interior geography of a soul learning to discard the heavy burden of worldly pride in favor of a profound, humble union with the divine.
The New Morning: Poems
Alfred Noyes
In a world fractured by the shadow of the First World War, these verses serve as a steadying beacon, tracing a path from the immediate, visceral pain of the front lines toward a resilient, enduring hope.
Enthusiasm and Other Poems
Susanna Moodie
A soul kindled by natural wonder and spiritual fervor confronts the inevitable decay of human fame, finding ultimate peace only in the eternal promise of the Divine.
The poetical works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
A dark, glittering descent into human grief, loss, and the haunting edge of memory awaits within these verses.
Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse
R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore
A retired novelist looks back on his creative life with quiet self-deprecation, gathering four narrative poems that test love, duty, and human pride against time and fate.
The Home Book of Verse
Burton Egbert Stevenson
A sweeping arc of human life moves from infancy's innocent lullabies and nursery play through romantic partings, aging's quiet griefs, and the final look back at lost youth.
A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems
Arthur Waley
An ancient civilization speaks across centuries, stripped of elaborate artifice to expose the plain, quiet weight of human affection, exile, and regret.
The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore: Collected by Himself with Explanatory Notes
Thomas Moore
A sweeping lifetime of verse moves from passionate classical translations and romantic ballads to sharp political satires and elaborate Oriental epics. It captures both the delicate heartache of private devotion and the fiery struggle for national freedom.
St Baldred of the Bass, a Pictish legend
James Miller
A collection of Scottish verse and drama weaves together saintly legends, tragic sieges, and local folklore across East Lothian, capturing a landscape deeply haunted by its violent past and miraculous traditions.
The Home Book of Verse
Burton Egbert Stevenson
A sweeping journey through human feeling begins with the quiet innocence of the nursery and travels across love, loss, nature, and the restless urge to wander.
An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry
Robert Browning
A passionate, intellectually rigorous defense of a notoriously dense Victorian poet offers readers an essential map to the hidden spiritual depth and artistic mastery behind complex dramatic monologues.
Ships in Harbour
David Morton
The sea and the seasons are not merely settings in these verses; they are living, ghostly witnesses to the human experience. These poems find the universal within the small-town square and the quiet harbor.
Poems from the Divan of Hafiz
active 14th century Ḥāfiẓ
A fourteenth-century poet finds eternity in the fleeting, weaving songs of wine, roses, and heartbreak that outlast the rise and fall of empires.
The sonnets, triumphs, and other poems of Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca
A restless heart navigates the landscape of unrequited love and the weight of history, seeking solace in verse that has echoed through the centuries.
Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon
Adam Lindsay Gordon
In the rugged, sun-drenched landscapes of 19th-century Australia, a restless spirit finds rhythm in the gallop of a horse and the mournful cadence of a life lived against the grain.
The Crescent Moon
Rabindranath Tagore
A collection of luminous, rhythmic meditations, this work captures the fleeting wisdom of childhood and the profound, transformative love between a mother and her child.
Path Flower, and Other Verses
Olive Tilford Dargan
The landscape of the soul is vast, and this collection maps its highest peaks and deepest, most shadowed valleys with unflinching grace. It asks what remains of us when the world’s weight presses down—and finds that beauty is the only thing capable of pushing back.
Modern Spanish Lyrics
Unknown
This collection gathers the voices of the Castilian tradition, bridging the gap between the classical masters of the seventeenth century and the vibrant, often revolutionary, poetry of the nineteenth century in both Spain and the Americas.
The World's Best Poetry, Volume 03: Sorrow and Consolation
Unknown
Through a collection of classic verse, this anthology maps the terrain of human grief, offering a landscape where the ache of loss is met by the steady, quiet endurance of the spirit.
Ancient Nahuatl Poetry, Containing the Nahuatl Text of XXVII Ancient Mexican Poems: Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII
Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison) Brinton
Long before European translators turned their attention to the Americas, indigenous bards sang of fleeting life, flower-adorned battlefields, and the mysterious Giver of Life. This volume brings twenty-seven ancient Mexican poems into print alongside their original Nahuatl text.
Poems You Ought to Know
Elia Wilkinson Peattie
Daily life in the industrial age leaves little room for reflection, but brief encounters with verse restore the inner spirit.
The old Hanging Fork, and other poems
George W. Doneghy
This collection of verse captures the quiet pulse of nineteenth-century rural Kentucky, finding deep significance in the common sights of a lost way of life.
Songs of a Sourdough
Robert W. (Robert William) Service
HOOK In the frozen, lawless reaches of the Yukon, men gamble their lives against the lure of gold and the crushing weight of a landscape that demands everything.
Poems: With Introduction and Notes
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
The verses gathered here offer an unadorned, intimate window into the mind of a foundational Russian master, presented with a stark, literal fidelity that prizes truth over ornamental rhyme. These poems capture the restless spirit of a man navigating the sharp divide between worldly ambition and the quiet, often…
The espalier
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The poems in this collection act as an espalier—a formal, disciplined structure trained against the stone wall of tradition to coax wild, living things into a controlled and beautiful shape. These verses explore the tension between the domestic, orderly life of the hearth and the untamed, often indifferent beauty…
A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems
A. B. S. (Alfred Browning Stanley) Tennyson
A collection of verse navigating the borderlands between youthful idealism and the cold, inevitable arrival of age. It captures a fleeting, dreamlike vision of existence where beauty is always shadowed by its own decay.
A Spanish Anthology
Unknown
This collection of Spanish verse, spanning from the thirteenth century to the late nineteenth, serves as an academic and cultural survey of the lyrical evolution of the Spanish language. It offers an immersive window into the rhythmic, thematic, and linguistic shifts that define the Spanish literary tradition,…
Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, and other poems
Matthew Arnold
The currents of destiny and the quiet, persistent search for truth flow beneath these verses, marking a collection that bridges the classical world and the restless spirit of the nineteenth century.