Free summaries
Poetry — page 6
305 public-domain poetry books, summarised. Page 6 of 7.
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 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.
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.
Bees in Amber: A Little Book of Thoughtful Verse
John Oxenham
A quiet companion for the restless spirit, this collection of verse offers humble reflections on faith, duty, and the enduring presence of the divine in the midst of life's inevitable storms.
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.
Ballads of Peace in War
Michael Earls
A soldier marches to battle with a mother’s blessing, while back home an old man finds a whole summer hidden in his winter window.
Archways of life
Mercedes de Acosta
The archways of human experience—love, ambition, and the inevitable decay of all things—form the landscape of these lyrical meditations. Through verse that balances sharp observation with a restless, searching spirit, the poet captures the fleeting nature of intimacy and the quiet weight of being alive.
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.
Coming to the King
Frances Ridley Havergal
The heart’s journey toward the divine is depicted here as a transformative pilgrimage, moving from a place of lonely longing to the radiant, secure presence of a sovereign King.
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.
Our Profession and Other Poems
Jared Barhite
A school principal’s quiet, earnest reflections on the moral duty of teaching and the enduring solace of the natural world.
Rhymes of a Roughneck
Frank J. Cotter
The Northland is a crucible of cold, ambition, and greed, where the human spirit is forged in the silence of the wilderness. It is a rugged, unforgiving frontier where men come to chase gold and leave behind the remnants of their former lives.
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.
Custer, and Other Poems
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The world moves in cycles of joy and sorrow, but the strength to endure rests entirely within the architecture of the human soul. This collection weaves together the grand, tragic history of the American frontier with the quiet, urgent philosophy of daily personal conduct.
The Path of Dreams: Poems
Leigh Gordon Giltner
The quiet melancholy of a late-Victorian heart finds its voice in these lyrical verses, where the transience of love and the endurance of grief are mapped onto the shifting landscapes of the natural world.
The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems
Washington Allston
The visionary power of the imagination is the true subject of these verses, which navigate the shifting landscapes of the human heart and the divine nature of artistic creation.
Acanthus and Wild Grape
Frank Oliver Call
A collection of verse bridging the old world’s classicism and the emerging sensibilities of the twentieth century, this volume explores the intersection of nature, memory, and the search for beauty. It stands as a testament to the enduring power of lyrical observation in a changing, often turbulent, world.
The rise and fall of the mustache, and other "Hawk-eyetems"
Robert J. (Robert Jones) Burdette
The nineteenth-century American landscape was one of rapid change, and this collection of wit and whim offers a sharp, satirical mirror to the era’s domestic anxieties, social pretenses, and the absurdities of daily life.
Russian Lyrics
Martha Dickinson Bianchi
These verses capture the vast, melancholy spirit of a landscape where the soul finds its only true reflection in the wildness of the steppe and the freezing breath of the northern winter.
"The Quiet Life": Certain Verses by Various Hands
Unknown
HOOK The weary mind, exhausted by the clamor of modern existence, finds a timeless sanctuary in the simple, ordered beauty of the rural landscape.
Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love
Laurence Hope
The heart’s relentless ache and the fleeting, intoxicating beauty of human connection are the dual spirits that haunt this collection of verse. It finds its home in the silent, moon-drenched spaces between desire and loss.
Lays of ancient Virginia, and other poems
James Avis Bartley
The spirit of nineteenth-century Virginia breathes through these pages, capturing the intersection of colonial legend, romantic idealism, and a deep-seated devotion to the landscapes of the American South.
Many Voices: Poems
E. (Edith) Nesbit
A collection of lyric verse that moves from the bright, domestic magic of youth to the searing, shadowed realities of wartime sacrifice, this volume charts the emotional geography of a life lived through decades of transition.
Chimneysmoke
Christopher Morley
A quiet domestic warmth flickers across these pages, where daily suburban chores and small city observations are lit with steady affection.
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.
The Masque of the Elements
Herman George Scheffauer
Desolation gives way to rebirth when cosmic entities speak across the empty wastes of time and space.
The Pilgrims of Hope and Chants for Socialists
William Morris
A country romance transforms into a stark encounter with urban poverty and revolutionary struggle, binding personal devotion to a grand vision of human liberation.
An Irish Crazy-Quilt: Smiles and tears, woven into song and story
Arthur M. Forrester
Struggling tenants, absurd officials, and fiery patriots collide across a landscape of political upheaval, absurd local rivalries, and unyielding national pride.
Stray Pebbles from the Shores of Thought
Elizabeth Porter Gould
A quietly radiant collection of Victorian verse turns a gentle eye toward the small, sacred moments of daily life, where nature, grief, and faith intersect.
Landscape and Song
Unknown
A delicate interplay of nature's beauty and human emotion lingers long after the final verse fades away.
More Cricket Songs
Norman Gale
A joyful, nostalgic celebration of English cricket, this collection captures the game’s simple pleasures, crisp sunny mornings, dynamic heroes, and enduring camaraderie through energetic light verse.
Rhymes from the Russian
John Pollen
A window into the Russian soul, opened by a translator who matches strict fidelity with surprising lyricism.
Poems of Sentiment
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A collection of impassioned verses measuring the height of human desire and the quiet weight of its cost.
Songs of Hafiz
active 14th century Ḥāfiẓ
The wine flows as the sun sets, and with it, the boundaries between the seeker, the song, and the divine begin to dissolve. These verses offer an invitation to cast off the weight of worldly sorrow and step into the luminous, fleeting garden of the present moment.
Twenty
Stella Benson
The threshold of this collection lies in the tension between a fragile, constructed present and a world that threatens to dismantle it. It is a quiet, sharp-edged map of a soul seeking refuge in its own making.