Poems You Ought to Know

by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

INTRODUCTION

Each morning, for several months, The Chicago Tribune has published at the head of its first column, verses under the caption: “Poems You Ought to Know.” It has explained its action by the following quotation from Professor Charles Eliot Norton:

“Whatever your occupation may be, and however crowded your hours with affairs, do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry.”

By publishing these poems The Tribune hopes to accomplish two things: first, to inspire a love of poetry in the hearts of many of its readers who have never before taken time or thought to read the best poems of this and other centuries and lands; and, secondly, to remind those who once loved song, but forgot it among the louder voices of the world, of the melody that enchanted them in youth.

The title has carried with it its own standard, and the poems have been kept on a plane above jocularity or mere prettiness of versification; rather have they tried to teach the doctrines of courage, of nature-love, of pure and noble melody. It has been the ambition of those selecting the verses to choose something to lift the reader above the “petty round of irritating concerns and duties,” and the object will have been achieved if it has helped anyone to “play the man,” “to go blithely about his business all the day,” with a consciousness of that abounding beauty in the world of thought which is the common property of all men.

No anthology of English verse can be complete, and none can satisfy all. The compiler’s individual taste, tempered and guided by established authority, is almost the only standard. This collection has been compiled not by one but by many thousands, and their selections here appear edited and winnowed as the idea of the series seemed to dictate. The book appears at the wide-spread and almost universal request of those who have watched the bold experiment of a great Twentieth-Century American newspaper giving the place of honor in its columns every day to a selection from the poets.

For permission to reprint certain poems by Longfellow, Lowell, Harte, Hay, Bayard Taylor, Holmes, Whittier, Parsons, and Aldrich, graciously accorded by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the publishers, thanks are gratefully acknowledged. To Charles Scribner’s Sons, for an extract from Lanier’s poems, and, lastly, to the many thousand readers, who, by their sympathy, appreciation, and help have encouraged the continuance of the daily publication of the poems, similar gratitude is felt.

CONTENTS

Addison, Joseph
The Spacious Firmament on High	[58]
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey
An Untimely Thought	[73]
Nocturne	[210]
Allen, Elizabeth Akers
Rock Me to Sleep	[30]
Arnold, Matthew
Requiescat	[90]
Self Dependence	[156]
Song of Callicles	[214]
Barbauld, Mrs. A. L.
Life	[161]
Beatty, Pakenham
To Thine Own Self Be True	[37]
Begbie, Harold
Grounds of the“Terrible”	[164]
Blake, William
The Lamb	[153]
The Tiger	[176]
Boker, George H.
Dirge for a Soldier	[53]
Bourdillon, Francis William
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes	[115]
Brontë, Emily
Remembrance	[42]
Brown, Brownlee
Thalassa	[140]
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
The Cry of the Children	[106]
Browning, Robert
Misconceptions	[184]
The Year’s at the Spring	[135]
Bryant, William Cullen
Thanatopsis	[112]
To a Waterfowl	[225]
Bunyan, John
The Shepherd Boy’s Song	[100]
Burns, Robert
Banks o’ Doon	[76]
Highland Mary	[152]
John Anderson My Jo	[185]
Scots Wha Hae	[182]
Byron, Lord
Destruction of the Sennacherib	[32]
Maid of Athens	[186]
She Walks in Beauty	[57]
The Isles of Greece	[232]
Campion, Thomas
Cherry Ripe	[36]
Carey, Henry
Sally in Our Alley	[68]
Carlyle, Thomas
To-Day	[179]
Cary, Phoebe
Nearer Home	[174]
Chatterton, Thomas
Faith	[144]
Chaucer, Geoffrey
An Emperor’s Daughter StandsAlone	[60]
Clarke, Macdonald
In the Graveyard	[166]
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Kubla Khan	[190]
Cunningham, Allan
A Sea Song	[134]
David
Psalm XXIV	[155]
Psalm XLVIII	[231]
Psalm XLVI	[44]
Psalm XIX	[74]
Psalm LXXXIV	[111]
Psalm CXXI	[119]
Dickinson, Emily
The Grass	[217]
Dobson, Austin
A Lovers’ Quarrel	[188]
The Paradox of Time	[208]
The Pompadour’s Fan	[75]
In Quaque	[188]
Durivage, Francis A.
All	[160]
Eliot, George
Two Lovers	[48]
Finch, Francis Miles
Nathan Hale	[212]
Foss, Sam Walter
He’d Had No Show	[93]
Garnett, Richard
The Ballad of the Boat	[172]
Gillington, Mary C.
Intra Muros	[21]
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
Mignon’s Song	[110]
Harte, Francis Bret
Flynn of Virginia	[204]
The Society upon the Stanislaus	[210]
Hawker, Robert Stephen
The Song of the Western Men	[129]
Hay, John
Jim Bludso	[64]
Little Breeches	[202]
Henley, W. E.
Invictus	[131]
Herbert, George
Virtue	[34]
Herrick, Robert
Counsel to Virgins	[138]
Delight in Disorder	[62]
Holland, Josiah Gilbert
Babyhood	[40]
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
The Chambered Nautilus	[87]
The Last Leaf	[84]
Hood, Thomas
Her Moral from Miss Kilmanseg	[95]
Past and Present	[123]
Song of the Shirt	[85]
The Death-Bed	[33]
Hunt, Leigh
Abou Ben Adhem	[107]
Ingalls, John James
Opportunity	[109]
Jackson, Henry R.
My Wife and Child	[220]
jonson, Ben
To Celia	[187]
Keats, John
Ode on a Grecian Urn	[97]
Key, Francis Scott
The Star-Spangled Banner	[120]
Kingsley, Charles
The Three Fishers	[230]
Knox, William
O Why Should the Spirit of Mortal	[228]
Lamb, Charles
The Old Familiar Faces	[18]
Lanier, Sidney
Evening Song	[54]
Lever, Charles
The Widow Malone	[218]
Logan, John
To the Cuckoo	[94]
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Arsenal at Springfield	[158]
Serenade (“The SpanishStudent”)	[96]
The Bridge	[76]
The Day Is Done	[200]
Lovelace, Richard
To Althea from Prison	[98]
To Lucasta on Going to the Wars	[35]
Lowe, John
Mary’s Dream	[124]
Lowell, James Russell
Jonathan to John	[222]
June	[194]
The Heritage	[116]
To the Dandelion	[170]
Lytle, William H.
Antony and Cleopatra	[226]
Mackay, Charles
A Deed and a Word	[47]
Mahony, Francis
The Bells of Shandon	[196]
McCreery, J. L.
There Is No Death	[25]
McPhelim, E. J.
Elia	[70]
Meynell, Alice
The Shepherdess	[130]
Milton, John
Song on a May Morning	[163]
Moore, Thomas
Believe Me if All Those Endearing YoungCharms	[101]
Oft in the Stilly Night	[63]
The Harp that Once	[195]
Though Lost to Sight	[20]
’Tis the Last Rose of Summer	[132]
Mulock, Dinah Maria
Douglas, Douglas, Tender and True	[149]
Neale, John M.
Jerusalem the Golden	[183]
Newman, John Henry
Lead Kindly Light	[72]
O’Connor,Joseph
The Fount of Castaly	[142]
Parsons, Thomas W.
On a Bust of Dante	[126]
Poe, Edgar A.
Annabel Lee	[178]
Pope, Alexander
Ode on Solitude	[103]
Read, Thomas Buchanan
Drifting	[50]
Realf, Richard
A Holy Nation	[23]
Ronsard, Pierre
The Rose	[143]
Rossetti, Christina
Uphill	[148]
Ryan, Abram
Song of the Mystic	[81]
Scott, Sir Walter
Bonny Dundee	[167]
Border Ballad	[169]
Breathes there the Man	[104]
Where Shall the Lover Rest	[216]
Shakespeare, William
One Touch of Nature	[89]
Portia’s Speech on Mercy	[207]
Ruthless Time	[46]
Song from “Cymbeline”	[71]
Time Hath, My Lord	[46]
To Be or Not to Be	[224]
Macbeth’s Soliloquy	[200]
When in Disgrace with Fortune	[19]
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Music when Soft Voices Die	[133]
An Indian Serenade	[141]
Sidney, Sir Philip
A Ditty	[118]
Sill, Edward Rowland
The Fool’s Prayer	[28]
Spalding, Susan Marr
Fate	[22]
Stevenson, Robert Louis
A Requiem	[90]
Suckling, Sir John
Ballad upon a Wedding	[192]
Why So Pale and Wan	[139]
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
A Match	[137]
Taylor,Bayard
Bedouin Song	[67]
The Song of the Camp	[146]
Tennyson, Lord
Break, Break, Break	[24]
Bugle Song	[108]
Crossing the Bar	[193]
Moral from “The DayDream”	[66]
From “In Memoriam”	[121]
Tears, Idle Tears	[151]
Thackeray, William Makepeace
At the Church Gate	[92]
The Garret	[198]
Tompkins, Juliet Wilbor
For All These	[45]
Villon, François
Ballad—Dead Ladies	[128]
Waller, Edmund
Go, Lovely Rose	[82]
On a Girdle	[199]
White, Joseph Blanco
Night	[79]
Whitman, Walt
O Captain, My Captain	[38]
Warble for Lilac Time	[206]
Whittier, John G.
Indian Summer	[181]
The Waiting	[136]
Willard, Emma
Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep	[105]
Wither, George
The Shepherd’s Resolution	[80]
Woodworth, Samuel
The Old Oaken Bucket	[86]
Wordsworth, William
The Daffodils	[162]
The World Is Too Much with Us	[102]
To Sleep	[17]

TO SLEEP.
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.