Theme · 15 poems
Poems About Strength
Poems about enduring — masks worn, cages sung in, fates mastered. Strength here isn't loudness; it's what holds.
LengthForm
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes · 1921
I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
6 lines · free verse
Success is counted sweetest
Emily Dickinson · 1864
Success is counted sweetestBy those who ne'er succeed.To comprehend a nectar
12 lines · lyric
Death, Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
John Donne · 1633
Death, be not proud, though some have callèd theeMighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
14 lines · sonnet
We Wear the Mask
Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1895
We wear the mask that grins and lies,It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—This debt we pay to human guile;
15 lines · rondeau
Invictus
William Ernest Henley · 1888
Out of the night that covers me,Black as the pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may be
16 lines · lyric
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
Mother to Son
Langston Hughes · 1922
Well, son, I'll tell you:Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.It's had tacks in it,
20 lines · free verse
Sympathy
Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1899
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
21 lines · lyric
No Coward Soul Is Mine
Emily Brontë · 1846
The following are the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote.No coward soul is mine,No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
29 lines · lyric
If—
Rudyard Kipling · 1910
If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you;If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
32 lines · lyric
Two Threads
The QuillOak Editors
Two threads alone are slender thingsthat any snag can sever,but twisted close, turn after turn,
8 lines · lyric
On His Blindness
John Milton · 1673
"All service ranks the same with God!There is no first or last."When I consider how my light is spent
15 lines · sonnet
I Am!
John Clare · 1848
I AM: yet what I am none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost;I am the self-consumer of my woes,
18 lines · lyric
Solitude
Ella Wheeler Wilcox · 1883
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;Weep, and you weep alone,For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
24 lines · lyric
The Village Blacksmith
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1840
Under a spreading chestnut-treeThe village smithy stands;The smith, a mighty man is he,
50 lines · narrative