The Norton book of light verse
(Book)

Twentieth century blues: from Certain Maxims of archy / Don Marquis -- The unknown citizen -- Doggerel by a senior citizen / W.H. Auden -- Bagpipe music / Louis MacNiece -- Insomnia the gem of the ocen / John Updike -- In a palor containing a table / Galway Kinnell -- The development / Marge Piercy -- Suburban / John Ciardi -- I am a victim of telephone / Allen Ginsberg -- In answer to you query / Naomi Lazard -- Clothes make the man / Jack Conway -- [Misericordia!] / James Lipton -- Annus Mirabilis / Philip Larkin -- Guess who / Fred Chappell -- [Babies haven't any hair] / Samuel Hoffenstein -- A man can complain, can't he? / Ogden Nash -- What's going to happen to the tots? / Noel Coward -- Pippa passes, but I can't get around this truck / Margaret Blaker -- Miniver Cheevy / Edwin Arlington Robinson --

Miniver Cheevy, Jr. / David Fisher Parry -- Arts and letters: The prisoner of Zenda / Richard Wilbur -- [What frenzy has of late possess'd the brain!] / Samuel Garth -- Triangular legs / A.P. Herbert -- I paint what I see / E.B. White -- The Russian soul II / John Hollander -- What Hiawatha probably did / Anonymous -- Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe -- Preface shrinklit: Elements of style William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White / Maurice Sagoff -- Earning a dinner / Matthew Prior -- The dover bitch / Anthony Hecht -- Simplicity / William Cowper -- Fie on eastern luxury! / Hartley Coleridge -- A Victorian paraphase / William Makepeace Thackeray -- The preference declared / Eugene Field -- Persicos odi: pocket version / Austin Dobson -- Myrtle for two / George F. Whicher -- Chicago analogue / Keith Preston -- The sycophantic fox and the gullible raven / Guy Wetmore Carryl -- He never did that to me / Noel Coward --

The purple cow -- Confession / Gelett Burgess -- Hamlet / Stanley J. Sharpless -- You're the top / Anonymous -- Brush up your Shakespeare / Cole Porter -- To Minerva / Thomas Hood -- [The limerick is furtive and mean] / Morris Bishop -- Song (from "Patience") / W.S. Gilbert -- Cacoethes Scribendi / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- The good old days / Barbara Fried -- To a thesaurus / Franklin P. Adams ("F.P.A.") -- The parental critic / Keith Preston -- On his books / Hilaire Belloc -- To a living author / Anonymous -- What's good for the soul is good for sales -- To an American poet just dead / Richard Wilbur -- The Sorrows of Werther / William Makepeace Thackeray -- Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman / Max Beerbohm -- On English monsieur / Ben Jonson -- from Jonsonian poem in progress / Peter Veale --

Survey of literature / John Crowe Ransom -- Mystery story / Howard Nemerov -- The probatioun officeres tale / Gerard Benson -- On Scott's "The field of Waterloo" / Thomas, Lord Erskine -- Oboe / Laurence McKinney -- A ballad / Guy Wetmore Carryl -- ('All the world's a stage ...') / Victor Gray -- Birdie McReynolds -- Miss Millay says something too / Samuel Hoffenstein -- Public journal / Phyllis McGinley -- Upon Julia's arctics / Bert Leston Taylor ("B.L.T.") -- What, still alive / Hugh Kingsmill -- Variations on a theme by / William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Koch -- Chard Whitlow / Henry Reed -- from Emily Dickson in southern California / X.J. Kennedy -- Justice to Scotland / Anonymous -- Variations on an air composed on having to appear in a pageant as Old King Cole / G.K. Chesterton -- Some fun with the mother tongue: Ascot waistcoat / David McCord -- On the motor bus / A.D. Godley -- The American India / Anonymous -- 'Twixt cup and lip / Mark Hollis -- Everything in its place / Arthur Guiterman --

Carmen Possum / Anonymous -- The naughty preposition / Morris Bishop -- O-U-G-H / Charles Battell Loomis -- Idyll / Stoddard King -- Local note / Arthur Guiterman -- Oh, Noa, Noa! / William Cole -- Woolly words / Robert N. Feinstein -- An Arab and his donkey / British and colonial printer -- Lapsus linguae / Keith Preston -- Only human: Life cycle of common man / Howard Nemerow -- I'm nobody! Who are you? / Emily Dickinson -- Brian O'Linn / Anonymous -- The jolly beggars / Robert Burns -- The dignity of labor / Robert Bersohn -- When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home / George Gordon, Lord Byron -- Carrousel tune / Tennessee Williams -- from My mother shoots the breeze / Fred Chappell -- from Three Epigrams / Theodore Roethke To a lady across the way / E.B. White --

Ha! original sin! / Ogden Nash -- Repentance / Louis Untermeyer -- The song of Mehitabel / Don Marquis -- Motley / Peter Davison -- Reflections at dawn / Phyllis McGinley -- The smoking world / Graham Lee Hemminger -- Saturday night / A.P. Herbert -- Darwinism in the kitchen / Anonymous -- Song for the squeeze-box / Theodore Roethke -- In Westminster Abbey / John Betjeman -- Trombone solo / Stoddard King -- I've been to a marvellous party / Noel Coward -- Life losers: The Pemmimist / Ben King -- Brats / X.J. Kennedy -- The flaw in paganism / Dorothy Parker -- The objection to being stepped on / Robert Frost -- On vanity of earthly greatness / Arthur Guiterman -- Mr. Artesian's conscientiousness / Ogden Nash -- Last lauch / Douglas Young -- Hallelujah! / A.E. Housman -- Requiem / Ogden Nash -- Sanctuary / Dorothy Parker De Sade / John Fuller [The night was growing old] / Anonymous -- Determinism / Anonymous --

For the poet who said poets are struck by lightning only two or three times / Peter Klappert -- Nobody loses all the time / E.E. Cummings -- My Angeline / Harry B. Smith -- Poor but honest / Anonymous -- Disillusionment / Virginia Graham -- Hello up there / Marge Piercy -- In a prominent bar in Secaucus one day / X.J. Kennedy -- A Piazza tragedy / Eugene Field -- To the terrestrial globe (by a miserable wretch) / W.S. Gilbert -- Personalities: By way of preface / Edward Lear -- Lines to Ralph Hodgson, Esqre. / T.S. Eliot -- Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg / T.S. Eliot --The gospel of Mr. Pepys / Christopher Morley -- [Sir Christopher Wren] / Edmund Clerihew Bentley -- Alma / Tom Lehrer -- Some Frenchmen / John Updike -- Fable / James Facos -- Graffiti / Anonymous -- Paradise Lost, Book V, an epitome / Anthony Hecht -- Heliogabalus -- Danish Wit / John Hollander --

Authorship / James B(all) Naylor -- Hernando De Soto, 1499?-1542 / Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét -- High renaissance / George Starbuck -- The baby Hilary, Siry Edmund / Kathleen Leland Baker -- Food and drink: A thousand hairy savages / Spike Milligan -- G.K. Chesterton on his birth / A.E. Housman -- Miss Fogerty's cake / Anonymous -- Lines on the mermaid tavern / John Keats -- XIII (from As the crow flies, let him fly) / Samuel Hoffenstein -- from The cynic / St. George Tucker -- The saginaw song / Theodore Roethke -- Attack of the squash people / Marge Piercy -- Waiter, please / Anonymous -- The story of Augustus who would not have any soup / Heinrich Hoffman -- Salad / Sydney Smith -- The universal favorite / Carolyn Wells -- Notes for a southern road map / Phyllis McGinley -- Any part of piggy / Noel Coward -- Oh, for a bowl of fat canary / John Lyly -- Turtle soup / Lewis Carroll --

Against Broccoli / Roy Blount, Jr. -- Giving potatoes / Adrian Mitchell -- A counterblast against garlic / Roswell Martin Field -- Cautionary limerick / Anonymous -- The little vagabond / William Blake -- "Hermit Hoar ..." / Samuel Johnson -- On Jam / Hilaire Belloc -- Lips that touch liquor / George W. Young -- Judged by the company one keeps / Anonymous -- Chorus (from Crotchet Castle) / Thomas Love Peacock -- R-E-M-O-R-S-E / George Ade -- Of drunkenness / George Turberville -- Occupations and preoccupations: Anthologistics / Arthur Guiterman -- The anatomy of humor / Morris Bishop -- 1. Pipling (from Three Epigrams) / Theodore Roethke -- Critics (from definitions) / E.B. White -- Cynical portraits / Louis Paul -- The purist / Ogden Nash -- The fiddler of Dooney / William Butler Yeats -- Bohemia / Dorothy Parker -- The news / John Godfrey Saxe -- The farmer and the farmer's wife / P.G. Hiebert -- Lord lucky / Hilaire Belloc -- The modern major-general --

The family fool / W.S. Gilbert -- The law / Samuel Butler -- Poll star / Felicia Lamport -- The old hokum buncombe / Robert E. Sherwood -- The orator's epitaph / Lord Brougham -- [A politician is an arse upon] / E.E. Cummings -- Election reflection / M. Keel Jones -- [Next to of course God] / E.E. Cummings -- What? / Langston Hughes -- The ruined maid / Thomas Hardy -- Crime at its best / Stoddard King -- On a clergyman's horse biting him / Anonymous -- Commuter / E.B. White -- Money, money, money: Reflections on the seizure of the Suez, and on a proposal to line the banks of that canal with billboard advertisements / Howard Nemerov -- Diogenes / Morris Bishop -- Money / Richard Armour -- Back through the looking glass to this side / John Ciardi -- Behold the deeds! / H.C. Bunner -- Little lyric (of Great importance) / Langston Hughes -- BOOM! / Howard Nemerov -- Introspective reflection / Ogden Nash -- Fatigue / Hilaire Belloc -- The rich man / Franklin P. Adams ("F.P.A.") --

On communists / Ebenezer Elliott

Art / Anonymous

Spectator ab extra / Arthur Hugh Clough

The complete cynic / Keith Preston

The advertising agency song / Anonymous

If I should die / Ben King

Correspondence betwen Mr. Harrison in Newcastle and Mr. Sholto Peach Harrison in Hull / Stevie Smith

From a London bookshop / Anonymous

Mr. Billings of Louisville / Eugene Field

Lord Finchley / Hilaire Belloc

[Don't steal. Thou'lt never thus complete] / Ambrose Bierce

Where are you going, my pretty maid / Anonymous

A summer morning / Richard Wilbur

from One from one leave two / Ogden Nash

Ports of call: Trials of a tourist / Anne Tibble

The owl and the pussy cat / Edward Lear

Written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos

The Lisbon packet / George Gordon, Lord Byron.

-- Public aid for Niagara Falls -- Ozymandias revisited / Morris Bishop -- Owed to New York--1906 / Byron Rufus Newton -- Cologne / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- On my joyful departure from the same city / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- The alarmed skipper / James Thomas Fields -- The devil in Texas / Anonymous -- Boston / Samuel C. Bushnell -- New Jersey Turnpike / Richard Cumbie -- The view from a cab / Henry Taylor -- '¡Wellcome, to the caves of Arta!' / Robert Craves -- Robinson Crusoe's story / Charles Edward Carryl -- A bar on the Piccola Marina / Noel Coward -- Mad dogs and Englishmen / Noel Coward -- Burma-shave / Anonymous -- Love: To mistress Margaret Hussey / John Skelton --

The passionate shephred to his love / Christopher Marlowe -- The nymph's reply to the shepherd / Sir Walter Ralegh -- When as the rye reach the chin / George Peele -- A sea song (from the Tempest) -- O mistress mine (from Twelfth Night) / William Shakespeare -- Women constancy -- Song -- The apparition -- The flea / John Donne -- Come, My Celia / Ben Johnson -- Upon Julia's clothes -- To the Virgins, To make much of time / Robert Herrick -- Why so pale and wan? -- Out upon it! I have loved / Sir John Suckling -- Song -- Upon leaving His mistress / John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester -- A gentle echo on woman / Jonathan Swift -- Song / William Congreve -- I once was a maid / Robert Burns -- To cloe / Thomas Moore -- Jenny kissed me / Leigh Hunt -- Sharing Eve's apple / John Keats -- Our photograph / Frederick Locker-Lampson -- The dark eyed gentleman / Thomas Hardy -- Helen / James Harrison --

The passionate professor / Bert Leston Taylor ("B.L.T.") -- Mia Carlotta / T.A. Daly -- When one loves tensely / Don Marquis -- The reconciliation: a modern version, Odes of Horace III 9 / Franklin P. Adams ("F.P.A.") -- Limberick / Conrad Aiken -- I like them fluffy / A.P. Herbert -- from the Mimic muse -- from Invocation / Samuel Hoffenstein -- from Always true to you in my fashion -- from You're the top / Cole Porter -- [May I feel said he] / E.E. Cummings -- Irish son (Rosie O'Grady) / Noel Coward -- Major Macroo / Stevie Smith -- [He told his life story to Mrs. courtly] / Stevie Smith -- Come, live with me and be my love / C. Day Lewis -- For an amorous lady / Theodore Roethke -- Pictures in the smoke -- One perfect rose -- Comment / Dorothy Parker -- Pickin em up and layin em down / Maya Angelou -- Crabs / Marge Piercy --

Samuel Sewall / Anthony Hecht -- Pangloss's song: a comic opera lyric / Richard Wilbur -- Ending / Gavin Ewart -- Bacchanal / Peter De Vries -- Sacred and profane love, or, there's nothing new under the moon either -- T his importanate mistress / Peter De Vries -- Fife tune / John Manifold -- La, la, la! / Thomas M. Disch -- Low church / Stanley J. Sharpless -- Family pleasures: The jungle husband / Stevie Smith -- The Brewer's man / L.A.G. Strong -- Wife and home / Clarence Day -- In praise of cocoa, cupids nightcap / Stanley J. Sharpless -- Careless talk / Mark Hollis -- Morning after / Langston Hughes -- The cudgeled husband / Jonathan Swift -- Cause and effect / Matthew Prior -- Dust to dust / Thomas Hood -- The saddled ass / Deems Taylor -- Uncle IV surveys his domain from his rocker of a Sunday afternoon as Aunt Dory starts to chop kindling / Jonathan Williams -- A new world symphony / Kit Wright -- Reflection on babies / Ogden Nash -- Mehitabel and her kittens / Don Marquis --

The perfect child / Adrian Porter -- A serenade (from Domestic poems) / Thomas Hood -- Sales talk for Annie / Morris Bishop -- Indifference / Harry Graham -- Henry King -- Franklin Hyde who caroused in the dirt and was corrected by his uncle / Hilaire Belloc -- Speak roughly to your little boy / Lewis Carroll -- John, Tom, and James / Charles Henry Ross -- Mother doesn't want a dog / Judith Viorst -- [As into the garden Elizabeth ran] / A.E. Housman -- My Papa's waltz / Theodore Roethke -- from The little One's A.B.C. / Noel Coward -- Tender-heartedness -- L'enfant glacé / Harry Graham Ballade of lost objects / Phyllis McGinley -- Ghristmas family reunion / Peter De Vries -- P.G.: God and bad children - Looking forward -- Whole duty of children / Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sweet Levinsky / Allen Ginsberg -- Our bog is dood / Stevie Smith -- Ballad / Charles Stuart Calverley -- [He thought he saw an elephant] -- Jabberwocky / Lewis Carroll -- There was a king / Anonymous --

Slithergade / Shel Silverstein -- The sugar-plum tree -- Wynken, Blynken and Nod / Eugene Field -- The Walloping window-blind / Charles Edward Carryl -- Simon Legree--a Negro ser/ Vachel Lindsay -- Macavity: the mystery cat -- The naming of cats / T.S. Eliot -- Solomon Grundy / Anonymous -- Little Orphant Annie / James Whitcomb Riley -- Eletelephony / Laura E. Richards -- The house that Jack built / Anonymous -- Antigonish / Hughes Mearns -- Bed in summer / Robert Louis Stevenson -- 'Mips and Ma the Mooly Moo' / (from 'Praise to the end') / Theodore Roethke -- I had but fifty cents -- For those who always fear the worst / Anonymous -- Honey moon / Kathleen Leland Baker -- [The shades of night were falling fast] / A.E. Housman -- The land of counterpane / Robert Louis Stevenson -- Father William / Lewis Carroll -- Nature's blessings: The snow lightt / May Sarton --

XX (from Tulips & chimneys) / E.E. Cummings -- Song / Robert Browning -- For city spring / Stephen Vincent Benét -- Spring (from Love's labours's lost) / William Shakespeare -- Public beach (Long Island sound) / Christopher Morley -- The pedlar's song (from The winter's tale) / William Shakespeare -- Ode to the end of summer / Phyllis McGinley -- Laughing song / William Blake -- from The Tempest -- Feste's song / William Shakespeare -- Pennsylvania deutsch / Christopher Morley -- The rain it raineth / Lord Bowen -- Window ledge in the atom age / E.B. White -- Virtual particles / Frank Wilczek -- To make a prairie / Emily Dickinson -- Two voices in a meadow / Richard Wilbur -- Idealism / Ronald Knox -- A reply -- Cuckoo Song / Anonymous -- Ancient music / Ezra Pound -- Baccalaureate / David McCord --

Beastly things: The pecan. The toucan -- The pen-guin. The sword-fish -- The elk. The whelk / Robert Williams Wood --On the antiquity of microbes / Strickland Gillilan -- A sonnet / Marjorie Fleming -- The egg / Clarence Day -- Eggomania / Felicia Lamport -- [The common cormorant or shag] / Anonymous --The Yak -- The lion / Hilaire Belloc -- Disaster / Charles Stuart Calverley -- The Ballad of the Emeu / Bret Harte -- Sage counsel / Arthur Quiller-Couch -- How doth the little crocodile / Lewis Carroll -- The fat budgie / John Lennon -- Impromptu / Samuel Wilberforce -- The lady and the bear / Theodore Roethke -- [There was a young lady of Niger / Cosmo Monkhouse -- The red cow is dead / E.B. White -- [The hen it is a noble beast] / William McGonagall -- How to tell the wild animals / Carolyn Wells -- The frog / Anonymous -- Apex / Nate Salsbury -- Archy at the zoo / Don Marquis -- On buying a horse / Anonymous -- Riding lesson / Henry Taylor -- To a fish -- A fish answers / Leigh Hunt -- The grackle-- The termite --

The cow / Ogden Nash -- Eine Kleine Snailbusik / May Sarton -- Inhuman Henry or cruelty to fabulous animals / A.E. Housman -- Brave rover / Max Beerbohm -- Ye bruthers dogg / Jon Anderson -- LIII (from songs about life and brighter things yet) / Samuel Hoffenstein -- Drive a tractor / Caterpillar news and views -- Words to live by: A garland of precepts / Phyllis McGinley -- [Monday's child is fair of face] -- Sneeze on a Monday, You sneeze for danger] -- [They that wash on Monday] / Anonymous -- Advice / Langston Hughes -- Mother, Mother, are you there? / Felicia Lamport -- The star system / Richard Wilbur -- An adage / H.J. Byron -- The little old lady in lavender silk / Dorothy Parker -- Good and bad luck / John Hay -- Of money / Barnabe Googe -- The benefits and abouse of alcohol / Richard Cumberlad -- Advice to travelers / Walker Gibson -- Dial call / Christopher Morley -- Fable / Ralph Waldo Emerson --

The fly / William Blake -- Inventory / Dorothy Parker -- Ode on the death of a favorite cat drowned in a tub of gold fishes / Thomas Gray -- Manners / Howard Nemerov -- Probably / Keith Preston -- A maxim revised / Anonymous -- A word of encouragement / J.R. Pope -- Plays / Walter Savage Landor -- Might and right / Clearence Day -- Fatal love / Matthew Prior -- Be careful -- Proverbial advice on marriage -- On tomato ketchup -- Sound advice -- Hours of sleep / Anonymous -- Of treason / Sir John Harington -- An answer to the parson / William Blake -- Reflections on ice breaking / Ogden Nash -- News item / Dorothy Parker -- Twelve articles / Jonathan Swift -- Bile: Impromptu on Charles II / John Wilmont Earl of Rochester -- A satirical elegy on the death of a late famous general / Jonathan Swift -- Epigram on Sir Roger Phillimore (1810-1885) and his brother, George Phillimore / Anonymous --

To a blockhead / Alexander Pope -- On a stone thrown at a very great man, but which missed him / Peter Pindar (John Wolcott) -- To a sour reader / Robert Herrick -- An elegy on the death of a mad dog (from the Vicar of Wakefield) / Oliver Goldsmith --On Sir John Hill, M.D., playwright / David Garrick -- Censorship / John Ciardi -- Intimates / D.H. Lawrence -- What's that smell in the kitchen? / Marge Piercy -- Dick, a maggot / Jonathan Swift -- Traveler's curse after misdirection / Robert Graves -- Mrs. Trollope in America / Helen Bevington -- The rebel / Innes Randolph -- Speech / Henry Taylor -- A dead statesman / Rudyard Kipling -- Lord Barrenstock / Stevie Smith -- The rattle bag / Dafydd Ap Gwillym -- A glass of beer / James Stephens -- I do not love thee, Doctor Fell / Thomas Brown -- To R.K. / James Kenneth Stephen -- The Candid man / Stephen Crane -- XIII (from love songs at once tender and informative) / Samuel Hoffenstein -- On a painted woman / Percy Bysshe Shelley --

I (from songs about life and brighter things yet) / Samuel Hoffenstein -- To cloe / George Granville, Lord Lansdowne -- Wishes of a elderly man / Walter Raleigh -- The fool and the poet / Alexander Pope -- Departures: The aesthetic point of view / W.H. Auden -- Life is fine / Langston Hughes -- Résumé / Dorothy Parker -- A ballade of suicide / G.K. Chesteton -- The despairing lover / William Walsh -- A threnody / George Thomas Lanigan -- Dirce / Walter Savage Landor -- Emmeline Grangerford's "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd" / Mark Twain -- Finnegan's Wake / Anonymous -- In Christ church, Bristol, on Thomas Turner, Twice master of the company of Bakers / Lord Jeffrey -- A melancholy lay / Marjorie Fleming -- On the setting up of Mr. Butler's monument in Westminister Abbey / Samuel Wesley, The Younger -- Fragment from "The maladjusted: a tragedy," / Morris Bishop --

Orbit on Parnassus / F. Scott Fitzgerald

Epitaphium Citharistriae / Victor Plarr

Epitaph on the politician / Hilaire Belloc

Epitaph on a waiter / David McCord

Epitaph

1726, on Sir John Vanbrugh, Architect of Blenheim Palace / Abel Evans

On a carrier who died of drunkenness / George Gordon, Lord Byron

On Peter Robinson / Lord Jeffrey

John Bun / Anonymous

'Here lies Sir Tact' / Timothy Steele

After Grave deliberation / Elizabeth Flynn

Requiem / Robert Louis Stevenson.