Poem: Did you mean...?

A Praise Poem of Shulgi (c. 2020-2000 BCE), celebrating the famous run of 200 miles (321.8 km) in one day made by King Shulgi of Ur (r. 2029-1982 BCE). Exhibit in the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA...

A poem of the Roman poet Horace on a wall of the building at Cleveringaplaats 1, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This marble corner-block came from the Saraçhane excavations and dates to 524-527 CE. The inscription carries part of line 27 of a poem and reads "(The inhabitant of the whole world), sing your works, which are always remembered". From Istanbul...

The World's Oldest Love Poem was discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal in Mesopotamia. Known as the Love Song of Shu-Sin, the World's Oldest Love Poem is about both romantic and erotic love, and was read as a part of a sacred ritual known...

Rarely does a name survive as many millennia as Gilgamesh has. World-renowned men of letters such as Carl Gustav Jung and Rainer Maria Rilke spoke nothing but the highest praise for the ancient Babylonian epic about the popular and much beloved...

The Aeneid was written by the Roman poet Virgil who lived between 70 and 19 BCE during the Augustan Period (named for Augustus, the first emperor of Rome). The twelve-book long epic poem tells the journey of the Trojan Aeneas and the mythological...

Heimdall is a mysterious deity of Norse mythology whose main attribute refers to guarding the realm of the gods, Asgard, from his high fortress called Himinbjörg found at the top of Bifröst, the rainbow bridge. He has the might of sea and...

In Geoffrey Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370 CE), two genres of medieval literature are combined – the French poetic convention of courtly love and the high medieval dream vision – to create a poem of enduring...

Beowulf is an epic poem composed in Old English consisting of 3,182 lines. It is written in the alliterative verse style, which is common for Old English poetry as well as works written in languages such as Old High German, Old Saxon, and...

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is a narrative poem of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) inspired by the love affair between Xuanzong (r. 712-756 CE), the seventh emperor of the dynasty, and his consort Lady Yang. It was written by the Chinese...