Free summaries
Poetry — page 13
667 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 13 of 14.
The Druriad
Anonymous
A sharp, rhyming critique of the late eighteenth-century stage, this work serves as an acerbic guide to the actors, managers, and evolving tastes of London’s Drury Lane Theatre. It captures a moment when the grandeur of classical performance clashed with the rise of modern spectacle.
Zephyrs
Kate R. Stiles
A collection of nineteenth-century devotional verses, this volume seeks to offer solace to the grieving and encouragement to the weary through simple, sincere reflections on faith, nature, and the promise of the afterlife.
"The Santa Fe Trail," and Other Poems
Joseph Robert Wilson
This collection of verse captures the transition between the fading American frontier and the arrival of modern industry. It serves as a meditative bridge, anchoring the reader in the vast, unforgiving geography of the West while reaching toward the consolations of faith and memory.
Vignettes in Verse
Matilda Betham
This collection of verse captures the shifting, often melancholic interior life of a woman navigating the early nineteenth century. It is a work of quiet observation, tracing the thin line between deep private feeling and the external pressures of duty and loss.
Short Flights
Meredith Nicholson
The quiet, melodic verses in this collection capture a turn-of-the-century heart, where the vastness of nature and the intimacy of memory collide. These poems offer a gentle, lingering look at a world defined by the seasons, the weight of the past, and the simple, enduring bonds of affection.
A Lover's Diary, Volume 2
Gilbert Parker
This collection of lyric poetry traces the contours of a profound, impossible devotion, mapping the distance between two souls bound by circumstances but united in spirit. It explores the sanctity of memory and the quiet endurance of love in the face of inevitable separation.
An elegy written among the ruins of an abbey
Mr. (Edward) Jerningham
The ruins of an abbey serve as a stark monument to the transience of human ambition and the final triumph of enlightened reason over the shadows of the past. This poem traces the rise and fall of a monastic institution, contrasting the perceived darkness of its former superstitions with the clarity and industry of…
As the wind blows
Eden Phillpotts
A lyrical meditation on the passage of time, this collection explores the enduring beauty of the natural world and the transformative power of love through the rugged, ancient landscapes of the English moorlands.
Sweet Hours
Carmen Sylva
This collection of blank-verse meditations finds strength in stillness, offering a contemplative map for navigating the exhaustion of the human spirit. It serves as a quiet sanctuary for anyone weary of the world’s noise.
The White Comrade, and Other Poems
Katherine Hale
A young soldier, wounded in the trenches of France, finds his faith transformed by the spectral presence of a fallen comrade. This collection of poetry chronicles the profound spiritual awakening of a generation caught in the machinery of the Great War.
Characters from Life
James Parkerson
This collection of moralizing verse serves as a stern, didactic handbook for the common man of the early nineteenth century. Through rhythmic admonitions and character studies, it functions as a poetic mirror held up to the perceived vices of the era, warning of the rapid descent from respectable industry into the…
The Glebe 1913/09 (Vol. 1, No. 1): Songs, Sighs and Curses
Adolf Wolff
This collection of verse captures the urgent, defiant pulse of early 20th-century radicalism, mapping the intersection of personal desire and social revolution. It is an intimate, unfiltered testament to a soul seeking liberation in a world of cages.
The Sabbath Breaker Reclaimed
Old Humphrey
This cautionary and didactic poem tells the story of an impoverished laborer who finds spiritual redemption by abandoning his practice of spending Sundays in idle recreation. It remains a stark artifact of nineteenth-century moral instruction.
The Village Wife's Lament
Maurice Hewlett
The tragedy of a life built on nature and simplicity, abruptly shattered by the machinery of industrial-age warfare, finds its voice through a young woman mourning everything she has lost.
Verses of Feeling and Fancy
William M. (William Mackay) MacKeracher
A collection of Victorian-era poetry that navigates the tension between worldly struggle and spiritual devotion. These verses trace a path from youthful melancholy to a quiet, prayerful acceptance of life’s inevitable sorrows.
A new selection of miscellaneous pieces, in verse
Christian Gray
A reflective, mid-life gathering of verses from a nineteenth-century Scottish recluse, offering a poignant look at the quiet, often solitary experience of seeking beauty and solace in a rapidly changing world.
Across the Sea and Other Poems
Thomas S. Chard
The journey of the human soul toward grace is a long, often stormy voyage across the sea of life. This collection of verse offers a meditative look at the struggle to find peace amidst the inevitable passage of time.
Targum: Or Metrical Translations From Thirty Languages And Dialects
George Borrow
The raven has ascended to the nest of the nightingale, and through these pages, a restless spirit gathers the echoes of humanity from thirty disparate tongues. This collection serves as a singular monument to the curiosity of a polyglot wanderer, bridging vast cultural divides through the shared rhythm of verse.
Twenty Six Choice Poetical Extracts: Selected from Celebrated Authors, and Printed from Copper Plates Engraved Expressly for the Work, Each Embellished with a Beautiful Vignette, Illustrative of the Subject
Various
Through verse and devotion, a quiet collection opens ancient scriptures and rural landscapes to guide young souls toward spiritual reflection and eternal peace.
A Dark Month: From Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works Vol. V
Algernon Charles Swinburne
A month of longing unfolds in this sequence, as a solitary observer measures the agonizingly slow departure of May while awaiting the return of a beloved child. The absence of one small presence turns the bright spring into a season of grey, hollow shadows.
The Emperor's Rout
Unknown
The Emperor Moth, slighted by a rival’s social gathering, resolves to host a grander ball of his own. This whimsical verse narrative follows the preparation and chaotic aftermath of an insect society event.
The Girl's Own Paper, vol. VIII., no. 377, March 19, 1887
Various
This nineteenth-century miscellany offers an intimate window into the Victorian feminine sphere, blending moral instruction, domestic counsel, and serial storytelling into a single, cohesive portrait of an era.
Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure
W. D. (William Douw) Lighthall
A young nation stirs in the wild, northern light, awakening to its own destiny among the mountains and the maples. This collection of verse captures the pulse of a colonial society finding its voice.
Darkey Ways in Dixie
Margaret A. (Margaret Alice) Richard
A collection of dialect poetry captures the intimate, daily rhythms of African American life in the post-Reconstruction South, balancing labor and loss with resilience and faith.
Rebel Verses
Bernard Gilbert
The world is a precarious place, built on the fragile foundations of tradition and the restless, often violent, spirit of change. These verses capture the collision between a vanishing rural past and the brutal, modern machinery of war.
A Jongleur Strayed: Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane
Richard Le Gallienne
A wandering minstrel offers timeless verse for every lover, weaving romantic devotion, nature’s healing magic, and spirited defense of life's classic pleasures against a changing modern world.
My Rubaiyat
Sadakichi Hartmann
A wandering, meditative collection of verses, these stanzas invite the reader to abandon the search for grand, preordained truths in favor of finding beauty within the fleeting, often difficult circumstances of ordinary existence.
Poems
Mary Alice Walton
This collection of verses serves as a testament to the endurance of the human spirit when faced with profound physical and emotional loss. It offers a meditative, intensely personal look at finding divine purpose within the confines of suffering.
Sketches in Verse: respectfully addressed to the Norfolk Yeomenry
James Parkerson
This collection of verse offers a candid, plainspoken look at the anxieties and social landscape of early 19th-century Norfolk. It serves as a rhythmic, often blunt chronicle of rural life, economic hardship, and the moral codes of the time.
Wayside Weeds
William Hodgson Ellis
These verses capture a scholar’s dual life, where the rigorous demands of chemistry and the classroom give way to the whimsical, observant joy of a man wandering the Canadian outdoors.
Connected Poems
Charles Seabridge
A meditation on the transient nature of love and beauty, this collection of verse explores the bittersweet tension between the human desire for permanence and the inevitable reality of change.
In the Great Steep's Garden
Elizabeth Madox Roberts
The mountain air carries more than just wind; it holds the faint, lingering whispers of ancient legends and the secret lives of the flowers that cling to the jagged stone.
Poems of evolution
Langdon Smith
Across the vast, indifferent stretch of geological time, a single, persistent love story survives, binding two souls through every transformation from primordial slime to modern civilization.
Preludes 1921-1922
John Drinkwater
The dawn brings a reckoning, for she is the light that summons the heart to sing until the night of death.
Schneider Von Groot's Christmas dream
George Warwick
Wandering home on Christmas Eve full of drink and good cheer, old Schneider Von Groot falls asleep by the wayside and plunges into a bizarre, terrifying dream that alters his life forever.
In Divers Tones
Roberts, Charles G. D., Sir
Voices from marsh and myth sing an old-world nation into being, where ancient gods stride green glens, tidal dikes breathe salt desire, and urban streets mock rural peace.
Jingles
Frank J. Medina
A ragged, honest collection of turn-of-the-century verse, Frank J. Medina’s book catalogs the rustic humor, bittersweet romances, and quiet disillusionments of everyday American life.
The Inn of Dreams
Olive Custance
Beauty is a fleeting guest in a world weighed down by care, where youth dances briefly before the encroaching shadows of time and sorrow claim the spirit.
The Mountain Spring, and Other Poems
Nancy Rebecca Campbell Glass
This collection of verse offers a meditative journey through Christian faith, using the natural world and biblical narratives as mirrors for the human soul’s quest for redemption. It is a quiet, devotional work that finds its strength in simplicity and a sincere, earnest tone.
A Lonely Flute
Odell Shepard
A collection of verses that finds the eternal in the transitory, this volume captures the quiet, persistent pulse of the natural world and the bittersweet ache of human memory. It is a meditation on the beauty of fleeting things.
The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots
David Rorie
These verses capture the hard-lived, humorous life of a country doctor in rural Scotland, where the boundary between the tragic and the absurd is as thin as a Highland mist.
Puck in pasture
E. (Elizabeth) MacKinstry
A mischievous spirit forsakes the immortal hills to toil among mortal men, only to find that the boundaries between the human and the enchanted are thinner—and more perilous—than he imagined.
Science and poetry
I. A. (Ivor Armstrong) Richards
HOOK Modern life increasingly separates our emotional needs from scientific truths. This work explores how poetry serves as a vital, stabilizing force in an age where traditional dogmas are rapidly dissolving.
Sonnets from the Patagonian
Donald Evans
The world is a stage, and the poet is its most cynical, elegant audience member, watching the tragedy of human vanity from the velvet shadows of a private box.
The silver net
Louis Vintras
A haunting collection of verse that casts the human experience as a fragile, silver-threaded net, forever seeking golden prey within the swirling, treacherous currents of life and desire.
A Lover's Diary, Volume 1
Gilbert Parker
A young poet escapes the stifling confines of dogma and convention through a transformative, unrequited love, finding his authentic voice in the sacred, quiet intimacy of a chosen soul.
Axel Thordson and Fair Valborg: a ballad
George Borrow
Caught in the cruel machinery of religious law and royal ambition, two star-crossed lovers find their childhood vow severed by the state, leading them toward a tragic end on the battlefield.
Specimens of the Russian poets, vol. 1 (of 2)
John Bowring
Gathering the early blossoms of a burgeoning literary tradition, these pages bridge the distance between the icy north and the warmth of the English reader’s hearth. This collection serves as both an introduction to a new world of verse and an earnest attempt to transplant the spirit of a vast, emerging empire.