Martin Luther King Poems

These truly are the Brave, These men who cast aside Old memories, to walk the blood-stained pave Of Sacrifice, joining the solemn tide That moves away, to suffer and to die For Fre...

From a vision red with war I awoke and saw the Prince of Peace hovering over No Man's Land. Loud the whistles blew and the thunder of cannon was drowned by the happy shouting of th...

Written upon hearing that slavery had been formally abolished in Egypt. Unhappily, the professions and pledges of the vacillating government of Egypt proved unreliable. BY fire and...

Addressed to the Patrons of the Pennsylvania Freeman. THE wave is breaking on the shore, The echo fading from the chime Again the shadow moveth o'er The dial-plate of time! O seer-...

"A! fredome is a nobill thing! Fredome mayse man to haif liking. Fredome all solace to man giffis; He levys at ese that frely levys A nobil hart may haif nane ese Na ellvs nocht th...

ALL night above their rocky bed They saw the stars march slow; The wild Sierra overhead, The desert's death below. The Indian from his lodge of bark, The gray bear from his den, Be...

The General Association of Congregational ministers in Massachusetts met at Brookfield, June 27, 1837, and issued a Pastoral Letter to the churches under its care. The immediate oc...

STILL in thy streets, O Paris! doth the stain Of blood defy the cleansing autumn rain; Still breaks the smoke Messina's ruins through, And Naples mourns that new Bartholomew, When...

"GREAT peace in Europe! Order reigns From Tiber's hills to Danube's plains!" So say her kings and priests; so say The lying prophets of our day. Go lay to earth a listening ear; Th...

Written on hearing that the Anti-Slavery Resolves of Stephen C. Phillips had been rejected by the Whig Convention in Faneuil Hall, in 1846. LIFT again the stately emblem on the Bay...

THE proudest now is but my peer, The highest not more high; To-day, of all the weary year, A king of men am I. To-day, alike are great and small, The nameless and the known; My pal...

Before the law authorizing imprisonment for debt had been abolished in Massachusetts, a revolutionary pensioner was confined in Charlestown jail for a debt of fourteen dollars, and...

I HAVE been thinking of the victims bound In Naples, dying for the lack of air And sunshine, in their close, damp cells of pain, Where hope is not, and innocence in vain Appeals ag...

NOT without envy Wealth at times must look On their brown strength who wield the reaping-hook And scythe, or at the forge-fire shape the plough Or the steel harness of the steeds o...

President Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation was issued January 1, 1863. SAINT PATRICK, slave to Milcho of the herds Of Ballymena, wakened with these words "Arise, and flee Out...

THE Quaker of the olden time! How calm and firm and true, Unspotted by its wrong and crime, He walked the dark earth through. The lust of power, the love of gain, The thousand lure...

_Bro. Simmons_ "Walk right in Brother Wilson--how you feelin' today?" _Bro. Wilson_ "Jes Mod'rate, Brother Simmons, but den I ginnerly feels dat way." _Bro. Simmons_ "Here's White...

ALL grim and soiled and brown with tan, I saw a Strong One, in his wrath, Smiting the godless shrines of man Along his path. The Church, beneath her trembling dome, Essayed in vain...

Written on receiving a cane wrought from a fragment of the wood-work of Pennsylvania Hall which the fire had spared. TOKEN of friendship true and tried, From one whose fiery heart...

On the 2d of June, 1854, Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave from Virginia, after being under arrest for ten days in the Boston Court House, was remanded to slavery under the Fugitive...

Ever and ever anon, After the black storm, the eternal, beauteous bow! Brother, to rosy-painted mists that arch beyond, Blithely I go. My brows men laureled and my lyre Twined with...

Staccato! Staccato! Leggier agitato! In and out does the melody twist-- Unique proposition Is this composition. (Alas! for the player who hasn't the wrist!) Now in the dominant The...

Once I was good like the Virgin Mary and the Minister's wife. My father worked for Mr. Pullman and white people's tips; but he died two days after his insurance expired. I had noth...

John L. Brown, a young white man of South Carolina, was in 1844 sentenced to death for aiding a young slave woman, whom he loved and had married, to escape from slavery. In pronoun...

Oh, from the fields of cane, From the low rice-swamp, from the trader's cell; From the black slave-ship's foul and loathsome hell, And coffle's weary chain; Hoarse, horrible, and s...

THE sky is ruddy in the east, The earth is gray below, And, spectral in the river-mist, The ship's white timbers show. Then let the sounds of measured stroke And grating saw begin;...

Ho! workers of the old time styled The Gentle Craft of Leather Young brothers of the ancient guild, Stand forth once more together! Call out again your long array, In the olden mer...

"That fatal, that perfidious bark, Built I' the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark." MILTON'S Lycidas. "The French ship Le Rodeur, with a crew of twenty-two men, and with one hun...

Suggested by a daguerreotype taken from a small French engraving of two negro figures, sent to the writer by Oliver Johnson. BEAMS of noon, like burning lances, through the tree-to...

MY ear is full of summer sounds, Of summer sights my languid eye; Beyond the dusty village bounds I loiter in my daily rounds, And in the noon-time shadows lie. I hear the wild bee...