Poetry Archives

A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

Matthew Prior

How old may Phyllis be, you ask,
  Whose beauty thus all hearts engages?
To answer is no easy task;
  For she has really two ages.

Stiff in brocard, and pinch’d in stays,
  Her patches, paint, and jewels on;
All day let envy view her face;
  And Phyllis is but twenty-one.

Paint, patches, jewels laid aside,
  At night astronomers agree,
The evening has the day belied;
  And Phyllis is some forty-three.

What are tags?
Tags, sometimes called “folksonomies,” are words that describe or categorize a poem, like “20th century modernism” or “Italian sonnet”. Tags can help you find poems that have something in common, based on how other people classify them.

« Previous