Free summaries
Poetry — page 5
666 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 5 of 14.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Sisters' Tragedy, with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
HOOK This collection of verse captures the fleeting beauty of a vanishing age, balancing the sharp pangs of private heartbreak against a quiet, steady reverence for the enduring power of poetry.
Laments
Jan Kochanowski
The grief of a father who has lost his young daughter is not merely a private tragedy; it is the catalyst for a profound journey through philosophy, doubt, and, ultimately, spiritual reconciliation.
Puella mea
E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings
This meditation on desire and timeless beauty asserts that the speaker’s beloved transcends all the legendary icons of history, becoming a singular, living embodiment of Spring.
Sprays of Shamrock
Clinton Scollard
A collection of lyrical verse, these poems celebrate the landscape and folklore of Ireland through a lens of deep affection and nostalgic longing.
The Verse-Book of a Homely Woman
Fay Inchfawn
This collection of verses serves as a quiet, rhythmic companion for anyone navigating the relentless, repetitive labor of domestic life. It offers a gentle mirror to the housewife, validating the sanctity found within the smallest, most taxing chores.
The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 5 (of 5): Poems of meditation and of forest and field
Madison Julius Cawein
Solitary paths through autumn woods lead the searching mind into deep communion with nature, where ancient mythologies and quiet sorrow yield to enduring spiritual peace.
Antinous: A Poem
Fernando Pessoa
A grieving emperor sits beside his dead lover, attempting to transform overwhelming personal loss into an immortal myth through the power of art.
Taras Shevchenko, the poet of Ukraine
Taras Shevchenko
A bound nation’s agony and hunger for freedom find their enduring voice in the verses of a former serf turned poet.
Prison Poetry
Hiram Peck McKnight
A chorus of voice and verse from within nineteenth-century cellblocks reveals how locked doors cannot quiet the human soul.
Songs for a Little House
Christopher Morley
Domestic life on a quiet suburban street becomes a quiet sanctuary, offering warm shelter while world events rumble across the horizon.
Herbs and Apples
Helen Hay Whitney
Offers of fleeting joy, dark city shadows, and lost romance yield to quiet acceptance when a soul learns to give up impossible desires and rest in nature's uncalculated beauty.
A Channel Passage and Other Poems: Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Waves crash against high cliffs, and a soul leaps into mountain waters, seeking a purity that outshines human fear. From coastal gales to quiet English gardens, these verses measure man's fleeting place against nature's enduring light and righteous laws.
Poems
Edward Dowden
Poetry is often a secret language, a stained-glass window that reveals its true colors only to those standing within the quiet interior of the soul, rather than the bustling market-place. This collection gathers the verse of a scholar who spent his days in the demanding world of literature, yet retreated to these…
Sonnets from Hafez & Other Verses
Elizabeth Bridges Daryush
This collection of poetry captures the restless motion of the human spirit, weaving together original verse and meditations inspired by the Persian poet Hafez. It is a work of quiet intensity, exploring the tension between earthly beauty and the soul’s desire for the infinite.
Sonnets and Poems
Eleanor Farjeon
The verse in this collection captures the delicate, often painful threshold between the innocence of childhood and the heavy demands of an adult world at war. It is a work of quiet, crystalline observation.
By Trench and Trail in Song and Story
Angus Mackay
HOOK: These verses capture the rugged spirit of the Canadian frontier, blending the humor of the lumber camp with the solemnity of the Great War’s front lines.
In the Morning
Willis Boyd Allen
The sun rises on a landscape of faith and memory, where the quietest moments of a life—a child’s call, the blooming of a marigold, the turning of a page—become the echoes of the divine.
Miscellany of Poetry: 1919
Unknown
This anthology serves as a poignant, atmospheric time capsule from the immediate aftermath of the Great War. It gathers diverse voices to capture the collective exhaustion, cynicism, and tentative hope of a society emerging from catastrophe.
The Unknown Eros
Coventry Patmore
The sacred and the domestic dissolve into one another, revealing the divine pulse beating within the most ordinary human joys and sorrows. This is a sequence of odes that elevates the quietude of a faithful life into a map of the soul’s journey toward its creator.