Ririro.com - Poetry

"Again—his voice is at the door" is a short Emily Dickinson poem that captures the hush of a long-awaited visit. A woman hears a beloved voice, picks a flower to justify her face, and crosses the hall with trembling steps. Their careful talk, a walk with only the moon for company, and an hour of near-confession build quiet tension. What does such a moment cost, and who must count the price? Become...

"A great Hope fell" is a short poem in which Emily Dickinson describes a collapse so silent that no one hears it. The ruin happens within, a cunning wreck that tells no tale and lets no witness in. As the speaker hides the wound until it swallows a whole life, the mind's strength is tested like a ship foundering on land. The poem ends with a closing lid and a patient carpenter at work. Become a su...

"A happy lip—breaks sudden" is a short poem that sets two kinds of smiles side by side. One breaks open without warning, quick and unplanned. The other is worn with careful patience, so steady that it begins to resemble pain. Dickinson's speaker studies this second smile, freshly gilded and polished to turn away every searching glance. In only a few dashes, the poem asks what a face is hiding and...

"Ah, Moon—and Star!" is a short poem in which a speaker gazes at the distant night sky and boldly declares that no firmament could stop her. She imagines borrowing a lark's bonnet and an antelope's stirrup to reach the heavens by tonight. Then the mood turns. One person is farther away than any star, and that distance cannot be crossed. Quiet, playful, and aching, the verse builds from daring fanc...

In "Ah, Necromancy Sweet!", a speaker calls out to an learned wizard and begs to be taught his dark art. The request is strange and unsettling: the speaker wants to master a pain that surgeons cannot soothe and no herb on the plain can heal. In only a few lines, longing, desperation and a hint of dark magic collide, and the poem ends on a single stark word that lingers. Become a supporter of this...

"A House upon the Height" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that turns a lonely hilltop house into a riddle. No wagon ever reached it, no peddler approached, and no chimney smoke ever rose. Its windows catch the first sunrise and the last sunset, then hold only empty panes. Neighbors guess at the fate of the house's owner, but no one speaks of it. The poem's mood is hushed and eerie, and it leave...

"Ah, Teneriffe!" is a short poem in which Emily Dickinson turns a distant mountain into a silent monarch at the close of day. Sunset reviews her sapphire regiment, and daylight drops a red farewell, yet the peak stands unmoved in its mail of ice, its thigh of granite and thew of steel. Heedless of pomp or parting, it draws only one gesture from the speaker: a quiet, lasting act of reverence. Read...

"Air has no Residence, no Neighbor" is a short poem in which Emily Dickinson addresses the air itself, a presence with no home, no door and no fear of anyone else. The speaker calls it a happy, ethereal guest, then turns to a quieter image: an outcast's pillow at night and a faint, wailing inn called life. In a few lines, freedom and loneliness blur together, and the air's consciousness seems to p...

"The Power of the Dog" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling that questions why humans willingly open themselves to the grief that comes from loving a dog. With unflinching honesty, Kipling traces the arc of a dog's life — from devoted, unconditional companionship to the inevitable loss at the end of fourteen years — asking whether such sorrow is worth courting. The poem turns on the metaphor of love as a...

"Mother to Son" is a poem by Langston Hughes in which a mother speaks directly to her son about the harsh, unvarnished reality of her life — a staircase riddled with tacks, splinters, and torn-up boards. Through this raw extended metaphor, she maps her decades of struggle and quiet endurance, urging her son never to sit down, never to turn back, no matter how dark the climb feels. The poem is urge...

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a poem by Robert Frost that captures the fleeting beauty of nature's earliest moments — the brief instant when a leaf is still a flower, when dawn has not yet hardened into day. In just eight spare lines, Frost draws a quiet arc from Eden's fall to the fading of morning light, building a meditation on how the most precious things vanish almost the moment they appear. The...

"The Road Not Taken" opens with a solitary traveler pausing at a fork in an autumn wood, unable to follow both paths at once. Frost captures the quiet tension of an ordinary moment freighted with lasting consequence — the speaker chooses one road, consoles himself he will return for the other, yet suspects he never will. Decades later, he imagines retelling the choice "with a sigh," knowing that o...

"Hope Is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson opens with one of poetry's most celebrated metaphors: hope as a small bird that perches in the soul and sings without ceasing. Through three compact stanzas, Dickinson traces hope's presence across raging storms, frozen landscapes, and strange seas — growing sweetest precisely when conditions are harshest. The poem's quiet revelation is that thi...

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is T. S. Eliot's landmark modernist poem, narrated by a middle-aged man paralysed by indecision and self-consciousness as he moves through foggy urban streets toward a social gathering. Prufrock obsesses over how others perceive him — his thinning hair, his thin arms — while wrestling with an unasked, overwhelming question he can never quite bring himself to v...

October — Orchard of the Year is a short, lyrical prose piece that lingers over the quiet height of autumn. Boughs bend under glowing fruit, apples drop in the stillest hours, and leaves let go without a breath of wind. As gales gather, yellow leaves stream like sparks, and the narrator lies dreaming on warm moss beside a singing spring. Over it all, a gowned figure surveys the year's long labour....

"When the Frost Is on the Punkin'" is a short poem that captures a crisp autumn morning on a Midwestern farm. Turkeys gobble, guinea hens clack, and a rooster struts along the fence as a farmhand steps outside bareheaded to feed the stock. Written in warm rural dialect, the verse lingers on the contentment of a good night's rest and a rising sun. Read it online free and feel the harvest chill. Bec...

In Autumn, Edmund Spenser's short poem, the season arrives as a living figure dressed all in yellow. He is laughing and glad, his arms laden with fruit, relieved that hunger has been banished at last. A wreath of mixed ears of corn crowns his head, and a sickle rests in his hand, ready to reap what the earth has yielded. The single stanza glows with abundance, gratitude and the quiet joy of harves...

"These Are Things I Prize" is a short poem that gathers life's simplest treasures into a single grateful breath. A speaker names what he holds dearest: sapphire skies, silent hills, the shelter of forests, birdsong, murmuring rills and the smell of flowers after rain. Each image is small and sensory, yet the poem builds toward a quiet turn, where friendship and mirth are named best of all. It clos...

The Crown of the Year is a short autumn poem that greets a mellow morning still warm with the last of summer. The speaker looks closely at humble things: seeded dock in umber, golden hawk-bit, a single late wild rose, and crimson woodbine glowing like wine. Each plant becomes a dear friend, and each fading bloom carries a quiet ache. Beneath the wistful mood, the poem finds peace in the hazy purpl...

"(To Octavia)" is a short poem by Edgar Allan Poe in which a speaker confesses that even amid laughter, wine, and the warmth of friendship, his heart cannot escape its devotion to Octavia. He pleads with her not to strip away the one bittersweet comfort left to him — the aching hope that his longing will, beat by beat, finally break him free. The poem is brief but cuts deep, balancing festive joy...

"To Margaret" by Edgar Allan Poe is a short, tongue-in-cheek poem assembled almost entirely from borrowed lines — Milton, Cowper, Shakespeare, and Pope — each attributed with mock-scholarly precision. The poem poses a sly, self-contradicting argument: that writing is a "foul revolt" from beauty and wisdom, only to close with Pope's paradox that not writing is divine. The result is less a heartfelt...

"To Isaac Lea" is a short poem by Edgar Allan Poe in which the speaker reflects on a fateful decision — whether born of choice or chance — to commit entirely to a singular cause. With his worldly goods, wit, soul, and body pledged in full, the speaker frames devotion itself as a kind of fate. The poem is spare and intense, capturing in just four lines the weight of an all-consuming dedication that...

Stanzas (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe is a poem that moves through moonlit reverie and spiritual longing, tracing the strange power that beauty and light hold over the human soul. A young man communing silently with the Earth carries a torch of passionate life he cannot fully understand. Through shifting images — moonbeams, dew, a broken harp-string — Poe probes the invisible force that stirs feeling...

Stanzas (1827) by Edgar Allan Poe is an early poem exploring the mysterious bond between a sensitive spirit and the natural world. Through four lyrical stanzas, Poe reflects on a soul lit by the sun and stars, stirred by moonlight, and caught between earthly passion and spiritual longing. A strange, harp-like awakening runs through the poem — the sense that beauty glimpsed in ordinary life carries...

"Spiritual Song" is a short poem by Edgar Allan Poe that opens with a commanding call to listen — "Hark, echo!" — before dissolving into a fleeting vision of archangels wrapped in pure happiness. In just a few spare lines, Poe conjures a sense of celestial sound hovering at the edge of perception, as if the divine can only be glimpsed in the briefest of moments. The poem's brevity is its power, le...