Epic Poems
The Congo: A Study Of The Negro Race
by Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
A deep rolling bass.
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
......
Baseball Canto
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem,
with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers,
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little
......
The Shangani Patrol
by Douglas Gird
On the banks of the wide Shangani,
Neath a dark and leaden sky,
In a glade of green mopani
A patrol went forth to die.
They crossed the rising river
On the trail of wayward Chief,
With orders to reconnoitre
And the coloumn would bring relief.
......
Don Juan: Canto The First
by George Gordon Byron
I
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.II
Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,
......
The Spooniad
by Edgar Lee Masters
Of John Cabanis' wrath and of the strife
Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
Who led the common people in the cause
Of freedom for Spoon River, and the fall
Of Rhodes' bank that brought unnumbered woes
And loss to many, with engendered hate
That flamed into the torch in Anarch hands
To burn the court-house, on whose blackened wreck
A fairer temple rose and Progress stood --
Sing, muse, that lit the Chian's face with smiles,
......
The day of rage
by Phillip Nine-Mafunga
He rode on a colt
To raid our vault
While sychophants find no fault
We have to bring this to a hault
By the gun an'the bullet as we revolt
All that fat will not hold
Our rage will bring all this to nought
PHILLIP NINE MAFUNGA
28 JULY 2024
Echo, Bells of Harmony
by Quinn Smorenburg
Echo, bells of harmony.
Ring your radiance down valleys
so cold. Shatter black ice covering
land. Make heavy shapes get up
and stand. Your gift guides paradise,
coming this way.
Resound, oh bells of harmony.
Fold your music as solid and shove
every ear idly lying; their souls slowly dying.
......
Woman And War
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We women teach our little sons how wrong
And how ignoble blows are; school and church
Support our precepts and inoculate
The growing minds with thoughts of love and peace.
‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite, ’ we say;
But human beings with immortal souls
Must rise above the methods of the brute
And walk with reason and with self-control.
And then – dear God! you men, you wise, strong men,
......
The Revelation
by Robert William Service
The same old sprint in the morning, boys, to the same old din and smut;
Chained all day to the same old desk, down in the same old rut;
Posting the same old greasy books, catching the same old train:
Oh, how will I manage to stick it all, if I ever get back again?
We've bidden good-bye to life in a cage, we're finished with pushing a pen;
They're pumping us full of bellicose rage, they're showing us how to be men.
We're only beginning to find ourselves; we're wonders of brawn and thew;
But when we go back to our Sissy jobs, -- oh, what are we going to do?
......
Kathleen
by Robert William Service
It was the steamer Alice May that sailed the Yukon foam.
And touched in every river camp from Dawson down to Nome.
It was her builder, owner, pilot, Captain Silas Geer,
Who took her through the angry ice, the last boat of the year;
Who patched her cracks with gunny sacks and wound her pipes with wire,
And cut the spruce upon the banks to feed her boiler fire;
Who headed her into the stream and bucked its mighty flow,
And nosed her up the little creeks where no one else would go;
Who bragged she had so small a draft, if dew were on the grass,
With gallant heart and half a start his little boat would pass.
......
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Arthur Patchett Martin (1 poems about Epic)
18 February 1851 – 15 February 1902 / Woolwich, Kent, England -