Address to a Haggis by Robert Burns: Full Scots Text
Address to a Haggis is a Scots-language poem by Robert Burns, written in 1786, and the full text appears below. Its eight stanzas praise Scotland’s national dish as a hero, and it is recited every January 25 at Burns Night suppers, where the host cuts the haggis open mid-poem. Praising a humble dish as though […]
Goblin Market Poem by Christina Rossetti: Full Text
Goblin Market is a narrative poem by Christina Rossetti, first published in 1862, and the complete text appears below. Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, hear goblin merchants selling fruit near a brook. Laura pays with a lock of her hair, eats until her lips are sore, and wastes away, while Lizzie refuses the fruit, endures […]
Pablo Neruda Poems: 10 Famous Works With Full Text
Poetry tends to find people when something hurts or when a feeling is too big to say plainly. That is often the moment readers land on Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who gave heartbreak, desire, a buried dog and a kitchen onion the same direct, unhurried voice. His lines travel well because they sound like […]
Edward Lear Poems: 11 Nonsense Classics, Full Text
A couple sails off in a pea-green boat, a whole family goes to sea in a sieve, and a lonely man wanders a dark plain with a lamp burning inside a nose he wove himself. All three scenes come from Edward Lear poems, the nonsense songs and limericks of an English landscape painter published between […]
D.H. Lawrence Poems: Famous Works and Full Text
D.H. Lawrence wrote about a snake at a water trough, a ripe fig, a piano, and his own death with the same blunt curiosity, and almost no two of those poems sound alike. The D.H. Lawrence poems readers reach for first are “Piano,” “Snake,” “Figs,” “Self-Pity,” “The Ship of Death,” and “Bavarian Gentians,” which together […]
Blackberry Picking Poem by Seamus Heaney: Full Text
Each late August, the speaker in Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking” fills cans with ripe fruit, and each year the fruit spoils in storage. That small, repeated letdown is the subject of this 24-line poem from his 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist, and it makes the blackberry-picking poem a lesson in how fast sweet […]