Greatest Poems of the Last Millennium

W.B. Yeats
"He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven"

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.








Edwin Arlington Robinson
"RICHARD CORY "

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown
We people on the pavement looked at him
He was a gentleman from sole to crown
Clean-favored, an imperially slim

And he was always quietly arrayed
And he was always human when he talked
But still he fluttered pulses when he said:
"Good-morning" and he glittered when he walked

And he was rich; yes richer than a king
And admirably schooled in every grace
In fine we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place

So on we worked and waited for the light
And went without the meat
And cursed the bread
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night
Went home and put a bullet through his head.







Percy Bysshe Shelley

"OZYMANDIAS"

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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd 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.






I can quote these three poems by heart (along with Robert Burn's "To a Mouse")
Ive always loved them.
Please give yourself an education and read them all the way through. You'll be the better for it