greykit.poetry — #ballad
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1899
[w-b-yeats]
The Song of Wandering Aengus
A silver trout caught in a hazel wood turns into a glimmering girl and vanishes; the rest is an old man's whole life spent walking after her, to pluck the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun.
-
1898
[oscar-wilde]
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Wilde's long narrative poem in six cantos about the hanging of a soldier at Reading Gaol — anchored in the refrain that each man kills the thing he loves, by each let this be heard.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Danny Deever
A hanging at dawn, told in the whispers of the men paraded to watch it.
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1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Ford o’ Kabul River
A cavalryman grieves the mate he lost fording the river in the dark.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Fuzzy-Wuzzy
A soldier’s backhanded salute to the Sudanese warrior who broke the British square.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Gunga Din
A soldier’s rough tribute to the native water-carrier who outdid them all.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Mandalay
A time-expired soldier in grey London aches for Burma, a girl, and the road east.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
Screw-Guns
A mountain-battery gunner’s swagger from the passes of the North-West Frontier.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
The Widow at Windsor
The Empire’s long reach, sung by the men who garrison it for “the Widow” — Queen Victoria.
-
1890
[rudyard-kipling]
The Young British Soldier
A grizzled veteran’s blunt, brutal advice to the raw recruit shipped out East.
-
1889
[rudyard-kipling]
The Ballad of East and West
A border horse-thief and a colonel’s son meet as enemies and part as blood-brothers.
-
1861
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
Paul Revere’s Ride
One if by land, and two if by sea — the signal lanterns in the North Church tower, the muffled oars across the Charles, and the midnight gallop through Medford, Lexington and Concord that woke the countryside.
-
1854
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Tennyson's galloping tribute to the doomed cavalry charge at Balaclava — half a league onward into the valley of Death, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.
-
1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Annabel Lee
Poe's last poem — a love that began in a kingdom by the sea, that the winged seraphs envied, that no angels in heaven above nor demons under the sea can ever dissever.
-
1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Eldorado
A gallant knight grows old riding after Eldorado, and is finally told by a pilgrim shadow where to look: over the Mountains of the Moon, down the Valley of the Shadow.
-
1840
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
The Village Blacksmith
Under a spreading chestnut-tree, a man who owes not any man — the ringing bellows, the children coming home from school, the daughter's voice in the village choir, and a life read back as a lesson wrought at the sounding forge.
-
1840
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
The Wreck of the Hesperus
A skipper who laughs at the old sailor's warning takes his little daughter into the hurricane, lashes her to the mast, and is found with her frozen on the breakers of Norman's Woe.
-
1820
[john-keats]
La Belle Dame sans Merci
A knight-at-arms palely loitering tells how a faery's child lulled him to cold-hill sleep, where pale kings warned — La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall.
-
1798
[samuel-taylor-coleridge]
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
A mariner shoots an albatross and is cursed to wander the earth, telling his tale of guilt, penance, and hard-won grace.