Theme · 10 poems
Poems About Power
Look on my works, ye Mighty: poems about empire, ambition, and what the sand keeps.
LengthForm
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1818
I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
14 lines · sonnet
The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus · 1883
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
14 lines · sonnet
I, Too
Langston Hughes · 1926
I, too, sing America.I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchen
18 lines · free verse
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats · 1920
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
22 lines · lyric
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1854
Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward,All in the valley of Death
55 lines · narrative
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves deadAre driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
70 lines · ode
Paul Revere's Ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1860
Listen my children and you shall hearOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere,On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
130 lines · narrative
I Hear America Singing
Walt Whitman · 1860
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
11 lines · free verse
London
William Blake · 1794
I wandered through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow,A mark in every face I meet,
16 lines · lyric
Concord Hymn
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1837
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood
16 lines · lyric