Free summaries
Poetry — page 5
281 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 5 of 6.
The rhyme and reason of country life
Unknown
A quiet joy permeates this collection of verse and prose, where centuries of writers gather to record the rhythms, subtle beauties, and enduring solace of the natural world.
Poems of Cheer
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A quiet, steadfast conviction that the human mind chooses its own peace radiates through this vintage collection of verses.
The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 4 (of 5): Poems of mystery and of myth and romance
Madison Julius Cawein
An ancient ruby pulses like a beating heart upon a lover’s hand, drawing its life from mortal blood before dissolving into mist. Across haunted forests and forgotten ruins, spectral figures and ancient gods whisper the secrets of love, decay, and longing.
A Reading of Life, with Other Poems
George Meredith
Homage to the wild speed of Artemis or surrender to Aphrodite’s warmth splits the human soul, leaving it to perish unless both forces are held within one breast.
The nature lover's knapsack
Unknown
Leaves rustle underfoot and waves crash against the shore as this volume gathers over a hundred voices to celebrate the quiet freedom of the outdoors.
The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon
Mrs. (Rosanna Eleanor) Leprohon
A quiet devotion to home, faith, and the snow-laden landscapes of the North shines through these pages, offering a calm refuge from a noisy world.
Silverpoints
John Gray
A shimmering artifact of the 1890s Decadent movement, this collection of verse distills sensory overload, sacred devotion, and dark eroticism into jewel-like, unsettling miniatures.
Victorian Poetry
John Drinkwater
Centuries of technical discovery and historical change shaped the tools available to nineteenth-century writers, forcing them to balance tradition against an expanding modern world.
Yesterdays
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A soul-bare collection of youthful verse captures the fleeting tragedies of broken vows, lost innocence, and the sudden, quiet turn toward resilience.
Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion
Unknown
Seeking connection with the divine, these verses offer a quiet space for reflection, grounding personal faith in the beauty of nature and the persistent pursuit of social justice.
Dreams and Dust
Don Marquis
This collection of verse captures the restless, defiant spirit of a man caught between the heavy pull of tradition and the urgent, flashing promise of a new century. It is a meditation on the audacity of human hope in the face of inevitable decay.
Poems & Parodies
Tom Kettle
The life of a man who died at thirty-six, spent in the service of poetry, politics, and the trenches, is captured here in a collection that balances the sharp wit of a brilliant mind against the somber realities of a soldier’s sacrifice.
The Cornflower, and Other Poems
Jean Blewett
The humblest moments of rural life often hold the profoundest truths, proving that the deepest joy is found in the simple, everyday connections we share with those we love.
The Rose-Jar
Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
Memories are like pressed flowers, fragile and haunting, kept within the quiet chambers of the heart long after the gardens they bloomed in have vanished into the grey distance of time.
The Chinese Nightingale, and Other Poems
Vachel Lindsay
This collection of verse captures the rhythmic, visionary spirit of early twentieth-century American life, blending folk-inspired storytelling with an urgent, mystical plea for global peace.
Poems
Maurice Maeterlinck
The quiet, glass-encased inner life of a soul unfolds here, where the world’s clamor is muffled by symbols of isolation, fevered waiting, and the relentless search for grace.
Legends and Lyrics. Part 2
Adelaide Anne Procter
A collection of gentle, earnest meditations on love, loss, and the quiet persistence of the soul, these verses find beauty in the small, often painful fragments of human experience.
A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The sea, the child, and the song are the three pillars that hold up this vast, rhythmic exploration of the natural world and the human spirit. It is a work of deep, rolling music, capturing a mind at once reverent toward the masters of the past and fiercely defiant of the rigid hierarchies of its own day.
Poems
Clarence Cook
This collection of verse captures the quiet, contemplative spirit of a nineteenth-century intellectual, mapping the intersection of domestic life, seasonal change, and the persistent search for spiritual certainty.
Christmas in Poetry: Carols and Poems
Unknown
Gathering medieval carols, folk songs, and nineteenth-century lyrics into a single choir, this collection frames the nativity through human eyes, woodland creatures, and winter revelers alike.
Echoes from the Sabine Farm
Horace
These free-wheeling American paraphrases of Horace's ancient Latin odes transform classical Rome's timeless meditations on wine, aging, and love into sharp, humorous, and affectionate verse.
The Haunted Hour: An Anthology
Unknown
Ghostly visitations are rarely about horror; more often, they are the quiet, aching echoes of love, grief, and unfulfilled longing lingering in the shadows of the living world.
The Lord of Misrule, and Other Poems
Alfred Noyes
A choir of English voices—may-dancers, doomed lovers, navy gunners, and ghostly highwaymen—cries out against a world rapidly sliding into war.
A drunk man looks at the thistle
Hugh MacDiarmid
A drunk man lies out on a cold Scottish hillside at night, fixated on a jagged thistle under the moon as his mind lurching through alcohol, memory, and metaphysics.
Florence on a Certain Night, and Other Poems
Coningsby Dawson
A restless soul wanders through ghost-haunted Florentine streets and quiet starlit heavens, seeking a permanent beauty to anchor the fleeting rush of youth.
When Day is Done
Edgar A. (Edgar Albert) Guest
When day slips down and the busy town gives way to quiet streets, home becomes a sanctuary where simple joys far outweigh the relentless chase for gold and fame.
Emblems of Love
Lascelles Abercrombie
The human heart is a theatre where love performs its most dramatic pageants. These poems explore how we are not merely actors in that play, but the very language through which love speaks its meaning to the world.
Religious Poems, Selected
Various
These verses offer a quiet space for reflection, gathering timeless meditations on faith, sorrow, and the promise of peace. They remain a steady companion for anyone seeking solace in poetic form.
Studies in Song
Algernon Charles Swinburne
This collection of verse captures the restless energy of the Victorian imagination, turning its gaze from the vast, indifferent power of the ocean to the intimate, fire-lit lives of poets and historical figures.
The Garden of Bright Waters: One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems
E. Powys (Edward Powys) Mathers
This collection gathers brief, lyrical snapshots of longing and loss from across Asia, capturing the universal pulse of desire through the voices of poets centuries apart.
Poems, Vol. IV
Hattie Howard
This collection of verse captures the quiet rhythm of an American life at the turn of the twentieth century, finding profound significance in domestic routine, the changing seasons, and the simple dignity of neighborly kindness.
All That Matters
Edgar A. (Edgar Albert) Guest
The true measure of a life is found not in grand ambition or status, but in the quiet, enduring grace of domestic love and daily service. This collection of verse captures the heartbeat of the ordinary, finding profound meaning in the simple rhythms of a home and the bonds between parents, children, and neighbors.
Home Lyrics: A Book of Poems
H. S. (Hannah S.) Battersby
This collection of Victorian verse offers an earnest, intimate portrait of 19th-century domesticity, blending personal grief with a fervent, wide-ranging curiosity about the natural world and the march of human progress.
Poems of Progress and New Thought Pastels
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
This collection of verse captures the fervent, moralizing pulse of early twentieth-century American idealism, where personal discipline meets the belief that thought itself can reshape reality.
Songs, Merry and Sad
John Charles McNeill
The world is often defined by the "little loves and sorrows" that tether us to our homes, our memories, and each other. This collection of verse captures those quiet, fleeting intimacies with the earnestness of a heart that knows how quickly time moves on.
A Book of Christian Sonnets
William Allen
An aged scholar gazes through his sickroom window at the cold winter sky, turning his remaining hours into rigorous, Fourteen-line meditations on divine truth, scripture, and the fleeting beauty of a physical world he expects soon to leave behind.
The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems
William Henry Drummond
A collection of narrative verse captures nineteenth-century French-Canadian rural life through the voices, dialect, and humor of its own people.
Freedom, truth and beauty
Edward Doyle
A passionate, blind turn-of-the-century poet surveys the struggle for human liberty across world history, transforming political outrage and spiritual devotion into high-keyed sonnets.
Collected poems of Alice Meynell
Alice Meynell
A quiet, exquisite architecture of thought where earthly landscape, human devotion, and divine mystery converge in austere, luminous verse.
The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems
Unknown
Captured by a Crimean ruler, a Polish princess brings quiet faith into a palace defined by absolute power, sparking a tragic chain of jealousy and silent grief that leaves an eternal mark on all who dwell there.
The book of jade
David Park Barnitz
The ennui of a brilliant, doomed youth finds its final, feverish expression in these pages. It is a work of ornate shadows, where the weariness of the world meets the exquisite precision of a poet turning his back on life.
Canadian Battlefields, and Other Poems
J. R. (John Richardson) Wilkinson
Across nineteenth-century battlefields, quiet Ontario lanes, and the vast expanse of space, this collection seeks a permanent refuge for human devotion against the steady, relentless march of time.
The answering voice
Unknown
Before the mid-nineteenth century, genuine love poetry written by women remained exceedingly rare, but this anthology gathers the lyrical voices that emerged once women began speaking openly of their own desires.
Hymns from the Morningland: Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service Books of the Holy Eastern Church
John Brownlie
A collection of lyrical devotions, these verses bring the ancient, resonant beauty of Eastern Christian liturgy into the quiet, measured cadence of Western hymnody.
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.
Digger Smith
C. J. (Clarence James) Dennis
A returning soldier struggles to find his place in a changed world, discovering that true homecoming requires more than survival—it demands the courage to be vulnerable.
Poems of love
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The danger of love is a fire that leaves hearts scarred, yet it remains the most intoxicating battle humanity ever dares to fight. This collection explores the perilous rapture of romance and the weight of moral duty in a changing world.
The Voyageur and Other Poems
William Henry Drummond
The life of the Canadian voyageur lives on in these rhythmic, dialect-driven verses that bridge the divide between the rugged wilderness and the warmth of the parish hearth.