The HyperTexts
The Most Popular Poems of All Time
The Most-Read Poems of All Time
The Most Anthologized Poems of All Time
Which popular poets wrote the most popular poems of all time? While I admit that my rankings
here are not "scientific," I did consult a number of sources. I started with
Google's rankings of the "most popular poems" and the "most read poems"
(searches which return "similar but different" results). I then factored in the
number of "direct hits" obtained by enclosing the main part of each title in
quotation marks (not as helpful when the title happens to be a common term, so I
repeated the searches using the poets' last names). I
also referred to reader polls such as Ranker's. And I used Lithub's rankings of
the top poems by inclusions in anthologies over the last 25 years and William
Harmon's rankings of older anthologies. I then tried
to determine which poems appeared highest in the most lists. While this may be
less than scientific, I think the results are interesting and meaningful. The
construct [#] means the poem ranked at the designated position in William
Harmon's index of the 500 most anthologized poems. An asterisk means there is a
note about the poem or poet at the end of the section. It's interesting, I
think, that most of the highly popular poems on the Internet also appear in
Harmon's index. That suggests that anthologists have done a generally
commendable job of including the best poems, or that being included in
anthologies makes poems more popular with the reading public. (Or perhaps a bit
of both.) But there are some head-scratchers; for instance, why is the
top-ranked poem with modern readers only #149 with the anthologists?
Here are some general observations: (1) The anthologists understandably tend to omit
extremely long poems like "Paradise Lost," "The Faerie Queen" and "The Waste
Land." (2) They also tend to omit story poems like "The Raven," "The Highwayman"
and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (perhaps due to length, but even shorter
story poems like "The Charge of the Light Brigade" seem to be out of favor). (3)
Anthologists seem to frown on inspirational poems like "If" and "Invictus." (4)
Poets who have written more recently have not had as much time to be
anthologized; for instance, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. Therefore, I have
given more weight to reader preferences.
compiled by Michael R. Burch
The Top Ten Most Popular Poems of All Time
(#1) "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost had 1.1 million "direct hits" according
to Google, 671K with the poet's last name included [#149]
(#2) "Do Not Go Gentle (Into That Good Night)" by Dylan Thomas had 1.2 million
direct hits, 391K with the poet's last name included [#37]
(#3) "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe had 16.6 million direct hits, even
with the poet's last name included! [#102]
(#4) "The Tyger" by William Blake had 492K direct hits with the
poet's last name included [#1*]
(#5) "Stopping by Woods (on a Snowy Evening)" by Robert Frost had 474K
direct hits [#6]
(#6) "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge had 390K
direct hits [#84]
(#7) "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot had 306K direct hits
[#27]
(#8) "Shall I Compare Thee (to a Summer's Day)" by William Shakespeare had 306K
direct hits [#23]
(#9) "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley had 1.6 million direct hits, 199K with
the poet's last name included [#21]
(#10) "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot had 2.5 million direct hits,
178K with the poet's last name included [#195]
[*] NOTES: The top three poems are very close, with "The Raven" leading in
"direct hits" and the other two ranking higher with other sources. William
Blake's "The Tyger" is the most anthologized poem in the English language and it
remains very popular on the web. The second-most anthologized poem, the ancient
ballad "Sir Patrick Spens," is not as popular today according to Google, perhaps
due to "dusty" language, so it ended up in my Honorable Mentions. It's hard to
quibble with any of the poems above, although I would have included William
Butler Yeats ("The Wild Swans at Coole"), Louise Bogan ("Song for the Last Act"
or "After the Persian"), Wallace Stevens ("The Snow Man") and Hart Crane (the
long version of "Voyages").
The Top Twenty-Five Most Popular Poems of All Time
(#11) "All the World's a Stage" and "That Time of Year Thou Mayest in Me Behold"
[#4] by William Shakespeare
(#12) "If" by Rudyard Kipling [not popular with the anthologists]
(#13) "A Red, Red Rose" [#122] by Robert Burns (the poem Bob Dylan said inspired
his artistic career)
(#14) "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley (the favorite poem of Nelson Mandela)
(#15) "O Captain! My Captain!" [#208] by Walt Whitman (one of his rare rhyming
poems, an elegy for Abraham Lincoln)
(#16) "Dulce et Decorum Est" [#102] and "Anthem for Doomed Youth" [#31] by
Wilfred Owen
(#17) "Paradise Lost" by John Milton (the last major epic poem in English, and
still a marvel of the language)
(#18) "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold [#8]
(#19) "The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri
(#20) "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou
(#21) "A Dream Within a Dream" and "Annabel Lee" [#124] by Edgar Allan Poe
(#22) "To His Coy Mistress" [#11] and "The Garden" [#62] by Andrew Marvell
(#23) "Ode on a Grecian Urn" [#49], "Ode to a Nightingale" [#26], "La Belle Dame
sans Merci" [#9] and "To Autumn" [#3*] by John Keats
(#24) "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes [*]
(#25) "I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud" [#42] and "Daffodils" by William Wordsworth
[*] NOTES: William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, Robert Frost
and T. S. Eliot each have two of the top twenty-five
poems, while Edgar Allan Poe has three and John Keats four. I was surprised and
delighted to see "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes appear in the top twenty-five.
It's one of the most musical poems in the English language, and one of the
spookiest. My mother used to read it to me and my sisters when we were children.
Today there are compelling YouTube performances of the poem as well. It's one of
the very best ghost stories, and well worth the time to explore (especially if
you have, or know, children). "To Autumn" by John Keats is the third-most
anthologized poem, according to William Harmon.
The Top Fifty Most Popular Poems of All Time
(#26) "One Art" and "The Fish" [#177] by Elizabeth Bishop
(#27) "Birches" [#236] by Robert Frost
(#28) "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge [#7]
(#29) "Ulysses" [#95] and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" [#284] by Alfred,
Lord Tennyson
(#30) "Sunday Morning" [#116] and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" [#173] by Wallace
Stevens
(#31) "The Windhover" [#30] and "Pied Beauty" [#5] by Gerard Manley Hopkins
(#32) "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" by Homer
(#33) "The Faerie Queen" by Edmund Spenser
(#34) "Dreams" and "Harlem (A Dream Deferred)" by Langston Hughes
(#35) "To an Athlete Dying Young" [#127] and "Loveliest of Trees" [#55] by A. E.
Housman
(#36) "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot
(#37) "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron
(#38) "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds" [#24] and "Fear No More the
Heat o' the Sun" [#25] by William Shakespeare
(#39) "Death Be Not Proud" [#13] and "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" [#106]
by John Donne
(#40) "In a Station of the Metro" [#265] and "The River Merchant's Wife: a
Letter" [#46] by Ezra Pound
(#41) "I Carry Your Heart with Me" by E. E. Cummings
(#42) "Love's Philosophy" and "Ode to the West Wind" [#35] by Percy Bysshe
Shelley
(#43) "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California" [#267] by Allen Ginsberg
(#44) "Song of Myself" and "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman
(#45) "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" [#29] and "A Certain Slant of Light"
[#144] by Emily Dickinson
(#46) "Daddy" [#178] and "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
(#47) "The Red Wheelbarrow" [#117] by William Carlos Williams
(#48) "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus
(#49) "Wulf and Eadwacer" by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon scop [*]
(#50) "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" [#494] by Oscar Wilde
[*] NOTES: William Shakespeare and John Keats both have four of the fifty most
popular poems. Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and
Edgar Allan Poe each have three. I was
especially happy to see "Wulf and Eadwacer" appear in the top fifty, as it's a
poem I have translated myself and have spent years promoting. It may be the
oldest poem in the English language written by a female poet, and it's as
powerful today as the day it was penned. The poem appears below, along with
several others in the top fifty. I like to think that I may have played a part
in the poem appearing in the top twenty-five with Google for "most read poems of
all time."
HIGH HONORABLE MENTION: "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" [#10] and "Upon
Julia's Clothes" [#14] by Robert Herrick, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
[#11] by Christopher Marlowe, "They Flee from Me" [#39] by Sir Thomas Wyatt,
"Sir Patrick Spens" [#2] by Anonymous, "My Last Duchess" [#43] by Robert
Browning, "The Darkling Thrush" [#54] by Thomas Hardy, "If You Forget Me" by
Pablo Neruda, "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou, "For the Union Dead" [#196]
and "Skunk Hour" [#103] by Robert Lowell, "The Armadillo" by Elizabeth Bishop,
"Musée des Beaux Arts" [#67] and "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden, "Voyages" and
"To Brooklyn Bridge" [#75] by Hart Crane, "We Real Cool" [#335] by Gwendolyn
Brooks, "Poetry" by Marianne Moore, "My Papa's Waltz" [#88] and "I Knew a Woman"
[#130] by Theodore Roethke, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" [#336]
by Richard Wilbur, "Church Going" [#337] by Philip Larkin, "Paul Revere's Ride"
[#313] by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Jabberwocky" [#18] by Lewis Carroll, "Tom
o' Bedlam's Song" [#268] by Anonymous, "Those Winter Sundays" [#266] by Robert
Hayden, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" [#68] by Randall Jarrell, "Shine,
Perishing Republic" [#386] by Robinson Jeffers, "Ars Poetica" [#175] by
Archibald MacLeish, "Miniver Cheevy" [#74] and "Richard Cory" [#148] by E. A.
Robinson, "Chicago" [#237] by Carl Sandburg, "A Blessing" by James Wright, "The
Second Coming" [#19] and "Sailing to Byzantium" [#22] and "The Wild Swans at
Coole" [#235] and "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by W. B Yeats, "Eloisa
to Abelard" by Alexander Pope, "A Poison Tree" [#355], "London" [#50] and "The
Sick Rose" [#94] by William Blake, "Mending Wall" and "Fire and Ice" [#129] by
Robert Frost, "Piano" [#151] by D. H. Lawrence, "To a Mouse" [#206] by Robert
Burns, "Fern Hill" [#57] by Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep" by
Mary Elizabeth Frye, "Hope is a Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson, "Let
America be America Again" by Langston Hughes
[*] NOTES: I also like to think that I may have played a part in popularizing
"Tom O'Bedlam's Song." Many years ago, I was unable to find the best version of
the poem online. The versions I was able to find were wretched facsimiles, with
glaring errors. So I looked up the poem in one of my anthologies and typed it in
very carefully. For some time, to my knowledge, that was the only correct
version of the poem available on the web.
SOURCES: Google "the most popular poems of all time" search; Google "the most
read poems of all time" search; Google individual searches of the top ten poems
by title (with and without the poet's last name); Ranker; Lithub; AllPoetry;
William Harmon's introduction to his Top 500 Poems anthology and his
index of "The Poems in Order of Popularity."
According to William Harmon, the top poets in the English language, ranked by
the number of poems anthologized, are William Shakespeare (29), Anonymous (21),
John Donne (19), William Blake (18), Emily Dickinson (14), William Butler Yeats
(14), William Wordsworth (13), Gerard Manley Hopkins (12), Alfred Tennyson (11),
Thomas Hardy (11), Robert Frost (11) and John Keats (10).
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Its loveliness increases; it will never
pass into nothingness ...
―John Keats
Wulf and Eadwacer (anonymous Anglo-Saxon ballad, circa 990 AD)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
My clan's curs pursue him like crippled game.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different.
Wulf's on one island; I'm on another.
His island's a fortress, fastened by fens.
Here bloodthirsty men howl for sacrifice.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different.
My thoughts pursued Wulf like panting hounds.
Whenever it rained and I sobbed, disconsolate,
huge, battle-strong arms grabbed and engulfed me.
Good feelings for him, but for me loathsome!
Wulf, oh, my Wulf! My desire for you
has made me sick; your seldom-comings
have left me famished, deprived of real meat.
Do you hear, Heaven-Watcher? A wolf has borne
our wretched whelp to the woods.
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.
Translator's Notes: This ancient poem has been characterized as an elegy, a
wild lament, a lover's lament, a passion play, a riddle, a song, or an early
ballad (it may be the earliest English poem with a refrain). However, most scholars place it within the genre of the frauenlied, or woman's song. It may be the first
extant poem authored by a woman in the fledgling English
language; it seems likely that the poet was a woman because we don't usually think of
ancient scops pretending to be women. "Wulf and Eadwacer" might also be called
the first English feminist text, as the speaker seems to be challenging and
mocking the man who has been raping and impregnating her. And the poem's closing
metaphor of a loveless relationship being like a song in which two voices never
harmonized remains one of the strongest in the English language, or any
language.—Michael R. Burch
In A Station Of The Metro
by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
A Blessing
by James Wright
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
by
Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer
by Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the
lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
A Red, Red Rose
by Robert Burns
Oh my luve is like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
Oh my luve is like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!
Dreams
by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Harlem: A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Note: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is
from Horace's Odes and means: "It is sweet and fitting
to die for one's country."
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1914, the year World War I
began. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Vanderbilt University,
where he studied under Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. In
1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and worked as a control tower operator
during World War II, an experience which influenced and provided material for
his poetry. Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was established in 1945 with the
publication of his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend, which
"bitterly and dramatically documents the intense fears and moral struggles of
young soldiers."
The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
When I Was One-and-Twenty
by A. E. Housman
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
She Walks In Beauty
by Lord Bryon
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
The HyperTexts