Free summaries
Poetry — page 12
571 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 12 of 12.
Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses
George Allan England
This collection of verse captures the restless spirit of a young writer at the turn of the twentieth century, blending youthful romanticism with a fixation on mortality. It serves as a personal archive of a poet’s intellectual and emotional development.
"Stella Australis": Poems, verses and prose fragments
E. (Emily) Coungeau
The vast, sun-drenched horizons of a young nation meet the weight of ancient history in these lyrical meditations on beauty, loss, and the promise of the Southern Cross.
Thy Sea is Great, Our Boats are Small, and Other Hymns of To-Day
Henry Van Dyke
Fierce storms and shifting tides buffet human life, yet steady trust, shared labor, and quiet inward joy offer an anchor through every age of doubt and war.
An Essay on War, in Blank Verse
Nathaniel Bloomfield
The poet finds a profound, often melancholic beauty in the rhythms of rural life, reflecting upon the heavy costs of human ambition and the quiet, persistent necessity of virtue.
A Woman's Love Letters
Sophia Margaretta Hensley
The heart’s quiet geography is mapped through longing, doubt, and the eventual surrender to an all-consuming affection. These poems capture the vulnerability of a spirit seeking its equal in a vast, often indifferent world.
Poems
Cora C. Bass
A collection of earnest, Victorian-era verse, this volume finds spiritual resilience and patriotic fervor in the face of life’s inevitable sorrows and the weight of history.
Summer Morning: A poem
Thomas Miller
The world awakens in a burst of jewelled light as the sun transforms the English countryside, inviting a meditation on the beauty of nature and the heavy, lingering presence of memory.
The White Canoe, and Other Verse
Alan Sullivan
The white canoe serves as a vessel for the soul’s passage through the wilderness, bridging the gap between earthly longing and the silence of the infinite.
Canadian Melodies and Poems
George E. (George Earle) Merkley
A reflective collection of late 19th-century verse, this volume captures the quiet, often melancholy intersection of colonial longing and the search for a distinctly Canadian identity.
Rose and Roof-Tree
George Parsons Lathrop
The poet scales the height of human feeling, turning common grief and the rhythm of the seasons into a ladder for the soul. Between the first bud and the final frost, a quiet grace persists.
The Coming of the Princess, and Other Poems
Kate Seymour MacLean
This collection of verse captures the Victorian spirit of a young Canada, weaving together nature, faith, and the profound melancholy of loss. It offers a meditative journey through the nineteenth-century heart.
Poems - Second Series
Squire, John Collings, Sir
A meditative collection of verse, this book chronicles the poet’s attempts to reconcile the stark fragility of human life with the enduring, indifferent beauty of the natural world in the shadow of the Great War.
Songs of the Common Day, and, Ave!: An Ode for the Shelley Centenary
Roberts, Charles G. D., Sir
This collection of verse captures the quiet intensity of the Canadian landscape, anchoring expansive human emotions in the precise, rhythmic details of rural life and the natural world.
My Valued Ruby: Poems
Perry Honce McGee
This collection of poetry captures the intimate, daily rhythms of an African American man’s life at the dawn of the 1920s. Through a blend of standard verse and folk dialect, the work serves as a personal archive of devotion, observation, and moral reflection.
Needwood Forest
Francis Noel Clarke Mundy
A lyrical celebration of a Staffordshire woodland and a mournful requiem for its enclosure, capturing the vanishing spirit of a storied landscape through shifting seasons and intimate observation.
Rosemary and Pansies
Effie Waller Smith
The quiet dignity of a life lived in shadow, marked by the labor of the hands and the steady, unsung discipline of the spirit, forms the heart of this collection.
Poems
Arthur Macy
The heart of this collection lies in the quiet, sophisticated observation of a man who found as much meaning in a shared glass of wine as he did in the heavy weight of loss. It is a portrait of a life lived with grace, wit, and a steady, rhythmic attention to the small things that compose a human history.
Songs Ysame
Annie F. (Annie Fellows) Johnston
Simple country lanes, glowing hearths, and the quiet passage of years evoke a deep, lingering nostalgia for simpler times and enduring human bonds.
Niagara, and Other Poems
Benjamin Copeland
The quiet intensity of a spiritual life unfolds here, where nature’s beauty and the human experience of loss are reconciled through a steadfast, unwavering faith.
The Miller and His Golden Dream
Eliza Lucy Leonard
HOOK A simple miller abandons his honest labor to chase the spectral promise of buried gold, only to find that avarice costs him everything he once held dear.
The silver cat, and other poems
Humbert Wolfe
This collection of poems explores the delicate boundary between mortality and the transcendent, using precise, lyrical imagery to examine how love and courage endure even when beauty fades.
The tongues of toil, and other poems
William Francis Barnard
The roar of the loom and the weight of the hammer echo through these pages, capturing a world where the dignity of the laborer is both a rallying cry and a burning necessity.
From the Lips of the Sea
Clinton Scollard
Listen closely to the ocean, for its darkling lips murmur the forgotten legends of antiquity and the infinite secrets of eternity.
Horizons and landmarks
Sidney Royse Lysaght
The unfolding of a life is mirrored in the shifting horizons of the heart, beginning in the sheltered wonder of childhood and reaching toward the boundless, often daunting, unknown.
Oxford poetry, 1918
Unknown
Youthful voices capture a vanishing world, standing at the precipice of a global catastrophe that colors every verse with urgency, beauty, and the fragile ache of mortality.
Brown leaves and other verses
Ella Stevens Harris
The delicate beauty of a blooming garden serves as a mirror for the human heart, where quiet reflection transforms everyday sorrow into lasting, spiritual peace.
Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems
Thomas Runciman
The Northumbrian moors and the restless, grey-toned sea define a life caught between the solace of nature and the inevitable reach of the grave. These verses map the quiet geography of a mind that finds beauty in the transience of all things.
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 10, No. 288, Supplementary Number
Various
This volume serves as a curated anthology and critical digest of the burgeoning "Annual" literature of 1828. It offers a cross-section of British intellectual life, blending poetry, moral fables, and lighthearted commentary on contemporary habits.
A Leaf from the Old Forest
John D. Cossar
The Old Forest is a sanctuary of song, a place where nature’s rhythms and the echoes of departed friendships converge to offer the weary traveler a respite from the world’s clamorous indifference.
Armenia immolata
Edward Strieby Steele
The world watches a tragedy unfold, yet the nations of the West stand idle, trading their humanity for the comforts of status quo. This is an urgent plea for moral intervention in the face of systemic slaughter.
Open Water
Arthur Stringer
HOOK This collection of free verse captures the restless, yearning spirit of a poet finding his own voice in the vast, open spaces of the modern world.
'All's Well!'
John Oxenham
Born from the grief and sacrifice of the First World War, these poems offer comfort to the brokenhearted while demanding a renewed, righteous world from those who survive.
The Twentieth Century Epic
Reuben Brodie Garnett
A sprawling, homespun verse critique of modern American life, Reuben Brodie Garnett’s book offers idiosyncratic commentary on law, science, morality, and social institutions at the dawn of the twentieth century.
The Two Twilights
Henry A. (Henry Augustin) Beers
Poetry is a bridge between the weary, material present and a transcendent, half-remembered world of beauty. This collection captures the bittersweet transition from youthful longing to the quiet acceptance of life’s closing act.
Debris: Selections from Poems
Madge Morris Wagner
In the twilight shadows of old Monterey and upon life's restless seas, broken vows and quiet steadfastness test the human heart.
Songs from the Southland
Unknown
Songs from the Southland is a nineteenth-century collection of American verse that gathers lyrical reflections on time, memory, war, and the natural world.
The Piper and the Reed
Robert Winkworth Norwood
A lyrical journey from the primal dawn of the cosmos to the eternal triumph of human love and divine companionship.
Where sunlight falls
Ruth Collie
When daily burdens feel too heavy and worries crowd the mind, small comforts and quiet resilience can transform the hardest journey into a path of unexpected grace.
Snowflakes
Esther Nelson Karn
Drifting snowflakes turn the brown earth to a sparkling velvet stage, while changing seasons and quiet rural vignettes unfold across country roads, quiet lakes, and memories of a bygone family life.
Poems
Frederic Manning
Mythic violence, doomed desire, and delicate natural observations collide across a collection that spans ancient battlefields, desolate seas, and quiet English gardens.
The Call of the Mountains, and Other Poems
James E. Pickering
Amid the crystalline waters of Lake Leman and the shadow of ancient Alpine peaks, a solitary traveler wanders through centuries of memory, architectural ghosts, and quiet meditations on human transience.
The Calendar, and Other Verses
Irving Sidney Dix
The seasons turn and the soul finds its rhythm in this earnest, pastoral collection of verse. These poems act as a quiet meditation on the inevitable passage of time and the lessons learned through a life lived in the hills.
His Lady of the Sonnets
Robert Winkworth Norwood
A speaker awakens from spiritual slumber to find transcendent love, navigating rupture and renewal before expanding his vision into dramatic monologues and devotional lyrics.