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somethingdarkerThe limitation of this category is whether or not I recognize an allusion. Some of the Project Gutenberg poems are probably full of allusions that I just don't get.
Groups of people named for geographic areas or for whom geographical regions are named (if I recognize them as such) will be in the other allusions document.
Some overlap with Supernatural/Religious. Things that aren't consistently proper nouns may be there instead.
Asking some stick, like Aaron's, to bud - James Russell Lowell "At the Commencement Dinner, 1866, in Acknowledging a Toast to the Smith Professor"
One faithful Abdiel may fearless brave unnumbered rebel foes - "Columbia's Safety" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.5, May 1862]
Wild as when Abel out of Eden died - Louise Imogen Guiney "On Some Old-Music"
And nettles strew the bosom of Abraham - Arthur Davison Ficke "To John Cowper Powys, on His 'Confessions'"
What Abraham was rich in - Philip Schultz "Luxury: Three"
Tracing a pigeon's god to Abraham - Keith S. Wilson "I Find Myself Defending Pigeons"
For the erring Absalom his father wept aloud - C.L.P. "Tidings of Victory" [The Continental Monthly v.6 no.6, Dec. 1864]
Caught still as Absalom - Isaac Rosenberg "Chagrin"
Achilles.
Adam (Allusion).
The sons of Agamemnon to their faith no longer true - "The Modern Argonauts" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no. CCCXV, v.LXVII, May 1850]
Great Agamemnon lifts his hand - J. Wareham "The Trojan War, 1915" [The Anzac Book: Written and Illustrated in Gallipoli by the Men of Anzac, 1916]
Ajax stands in the Trojan torchlight - John M. Ford "Troy: the Movie"
He fell as Ajax fell in Homer - Robert Hass "Heroic Simile"
Aladdin's wealth scarce mounted faster - W.P.P. "Epistle to the Editor" (The Knickerbocker v.23:5, May 1844)
Of rare Aladdin's wondrous cave - John Greenleaf Whittier "Snow-Bound"
Survey the stone where Alexander's ashes lay - Anna Laetitia Barbauld "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"
Her memories of Caesar, Alexander, the wolves on seven hills - Deborah Brown "Reprise"
Alexander's conquering star - Lewis Morris "Odatis"
Look'd scornful down on Alexander's might - Mrs. L.H. Sigourney "Bonaparte at St. Helena"
Like Alice through the looking-glass - Vachel Lindsay "A Doll's 'Arabian Nights'"
When Allen's rebel howl bares sharp canines - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Allen Ginsberg]
Where Amaryllis lies in state - Oscar Wilde "Theocritus"
An amazon of thought with sovereign eyes - Emma Lazarus "Chopin"
Dreamless long-dead Amen-hotep lies - Edward Thomas "Swedes"
Ammon's solar fount congeals - Benjamin West Ball "Concetto"
Ammut snapped up their hearts and swallowed - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
Egypt's Amun roused from sleep - John Greenleaf Whittier "Snow-Bound"
A grapestone choked Anacreon and hushed his song - Thomas Bailey Aldrich "Wyndham Towers"
Each town has its Andromache - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Our numbed faces are as stunned as Andromache's - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Mow through Andromeda spirals - Mike Allen "Deluge"
Prayed twice daily to Saint Anne - Chris Dombrowski "Comes to Worse"
To go see Anne Frank - Megan Fernandes "Amsterdam"
The last spark of Saint Anthony's fire - William Hodgson Ellis "Little White Crow"
And Antony with Egypt in his arms - Theodore Maynard "Sunset on the Desert"
Anubis endlessly brought forth the dead - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
Where Anubis was at his side - "The Story of Pyramid Thothmes"
Aphrodite with unbraided hair - Harold Acton "Lament for Adonis"
So rich in love's regret fair Aphrodite rose - Edward Carpenter "Aphrodite"
Ran to meet white Aphrodite risen from the sea - Olive Custance "Hyacinthus"
In aphroditic surreality to be preserved forever - Harry Martinson "Aniara 52: Shards from Mima" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
Apollo.
Aquarius is skewered by a sliver of sleep - John Grey "Skywatching"
Half breed son of Pisces and Aquarius - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
Arachne plies her gossamer loom - Benjamin West Ball "The Authoress of The Mysteries of Udolpho"
Arachne high did lift her cunning web - Edmund Spenser "The House of Richesse"
All Archimedean subtleties are vain - Benjamin West Ball "The Penitent"
Archimedes still holds his measured home - Joaquin Miller "As It Is Written"
Like the giddy Argonauts we were - Cyrus Cassells "Altitude"
And Argus not omniscience - Ken Chen "Brief Lives: Io" [excerpts]
Ariadne.
Ariel [allusion].
Citing something age-inappropriate from Aristotle - Joshua Bennett "You Are So Articulate With Your Hands"
Reread Aristotle by waning light - Alison Hawthorne Deming "Human Habitat"
Nor Aristotle the lore possessed - "The Pearl" transl. by Sophie Jewett
Simpler than in Aristotle's day - Arthur Waugh "The Learned Pig"
To Artemis my Queen - Edward Dowden "Atalanta"
Where Arthur's castle looms above - W. Wilfred Campbell "The World-Mother"
Of tourney won in Arthur's lists at Camelot - Martin I. Griffin "The Ride of Prince Geraint" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.XII, no.30, Sept. 1873]
Enjoyed the zeal of Arthur's rule - Herbert W. Hartman, Jr. "Dagonet"
Throws forty keys at Arthur's feet - Vachel Lindsay "Shantung, or the Empire of China Is Crumbling Down"
Dead as Ashtaroth's desire - Louis J. McQuilland "Immortal"
When Queen Ashtaroth beat at her lamp and fell - Humbert Wolfe "Columbine"
Isaac invented you in isolation - Mary Alexandra Agner "Be True" [context indicates Isaac Asimov by referencing the Three Laws of Robotics]
That old magic was Astarte's - Humbert Wolfe "Wheels 1919"
Grey doves of Astarte - Francis Brett Young "Doves"
In Astor's mansion, where the rich resort - T.W.P. "Letter Second: To Thomas Carlyle, Esquire, London" [The Knickerbocker v.22, no.1, July 1843]
Who is the smith or athena of this? - Brian Blanchfield "Learning"
Wide-eyed as Athena's wired owl - Diane Raptosh "American Amnesiac [Is it possible to let the sleeping life seep into day--]
No Juno eclipsing your Athena - Dean Young "Son of Fog" [Poetry April 2005]
Atlas.
Die before the shears of Atropos - Julia Kavanagh "Sonnet"
Augustine with his feet of snow - James Elroy Flecker "The Dying Patriot"
More saints for Augustine's mother - Brenda Hillman "Sediments of Santa Monica"
The spiritual steel of Saint Augustine - Alfred Noyes "Darwin V: The Vera Causa"
Aurelian led in his triumphant train - Myron L. Mason "Zenobia" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIII no.4, Oct. 1848]
Aurelian's soldiers swept the thirsty sands - Myron L. Mason "Zenobia" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIII no.4, Oct. 1848]
Like Asrael's venomed dart - Benjamin West Ball "Anastasius"
Azrael's eyes upon her, Raphael's wings above - Rudyard Kipling "Jane's Marriage"
The shadow of Azrael, angel of terror - Annie Porter "Selim" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.20, Dec. 1877]
Where Azrael reaps a full harvest - Barry Straton "Charity"
On a mission to the Aztecs - Captain Owen Rutter "The Song of Tiadatha"
Start crying down the wrath of Baal - Nelson S. Bond "The Ballad of Blaster Bill" [Planet Stories summer 1941 issue]
Snap-frozen in the blizzards called down by Baba Yaga - Jenny Blackford "Eleven Exhibits in a Better Natural History Museum, London"
Stolen by Baba Yaga's wicked swan-geese - Julia Kolchinsky "Naming"
Huddled by the space heater in Baba Yaga's hut - Lincoln Michel "Another Tuesday Afternoon"
Bacchus/Bacchanal.
The heavy task of learning what Bach knew - Constance Fenimore Woolson "Commonplace" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.11, no.23, Feb. 1873]
Triumph erewhile of Bacon's fabled arts - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
A fragment of the spectrum of Bahamut's shining scales - Tim Pratt "A Bestiary: Poor Bahamut"
As clearly as the ass explained to Balaam - "The Times" [The Knickerbocker v.10, no.4, October 1837]
Balder's funeral flames are blazing forth - Edmund Clarence Stedman "The Sleigh-Ride"
Bids everyone to weep for Baldur - Jo Walton "The Godzilla Sonnets: iii) Godzilla Weeps for Baldur"
As Bruce's followers shed the Baliol's blood - Delta "Lines Written in the Isle of Bute" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXVIII, v.LIV, Dec. 1843]
Each particle a Basho frog slipping into the pond - Richard Chwedyk "Rich and Pam Go to Fermilab and Later See a Dead Man"
As sharp and as multilayered as Basho's haiku - Keith Taylor "What's Needed Now"
Some architectural details about Batman's cape - Dean Young "Sean Penn Anti-Ode" [Poetry July 2006]
Where Dante dwells with Beatrice - Sophie Jewett "The Translator to the Author" (preface to Jewett's translation of "The Pearl"
Beelzebub flaps his frozen wings - Erika L. Sanchez "The Loop"
Silenced Beethoven with one paw - Rodney Jones "For Katy"
Hurtled in a Beethoven surge - Rodger Kamenetz "The Living Hive"
Deaf Beethoven's phantasy of tone - Emma Lazarus "City Visions"
And cuckoo mingle with the thoughts of Bel - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
All spent at Belial's shrine - Benjamin West Ball "The Penitent"
Belshazzar raised his eyes and saw - Frances E. Watkins Harper "The Jewish Grandfather's Story"
a cast net blessed by saint benedict - Amanda Gafford "Tigerlily"
Benjamin Franklin's Ghost House - Nicole Connolly "Dream Job"
Where Ben Franklin was baptized - January Gill O'Neil "Old South Meeting House"
Covering Beowulf's greatest hits on your tin kazoo - Catherynne M. Valente "What the Dragon Said: A Love Story"
A nova's flare from out the coils of Berenice's hair - Harry Martinson "Aniara 55" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
Blake knew how deep is Hell, and Heaven how high - William Rose Benét "Mad Blake"
Blake heard the asides of God - William Rose Benét "Mad Blake" [William Blake]
That was sung to the soul of the madman, Blake - William Rose Benét "Mad Blake"
Blake's angel parting willow leaves - Stephen Kuusisto "Only Bread, Only Light"
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me in the Seven Sacred Trances - T.S. Eliot "A Cooking Egg"
The roof of Blue-Beard's palace - Vachel Lindsay "When the Mississippi Flowed in Indiana"
To Ruth the eyes of Boaz shone clear light - Victor Hugo "Boaz Asleep" transl. not credited
Worth a score of dead Boccaccios - James Russell Lowell "Fitz Adam's Story"
Even when the Bolsheviks took his home - Mike Allen "Kandinsky's Garden"
I knew no harm of Bonaparte - G.K. Chesterton "The Rolling English Road"
Who broke the sin that Bonaparte planned - T.M. Kettle "Paddy (After Mr. Kipling)"
Toward the greenroom of John Wilkes Booth - Paul Gregory Nauert "Leaping Through the Centuries"
Boreal/Boreas.
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride - T.S. Eliot "A Cooking Egg"
Borgia fair the poppy is - Scharmel Iris "Fantasy of Dusk and Dawn"
Brims not with Borgia's wine - Muriel Stuart "The New Aspasia"
Drink gin o'er the tombstone of Brian Boru - "The Proclamation" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
Forever fixed on Brahma's airy throne - Benjamin West Ball "Elfin Land"
Drink gin o'er the tombstone of Brian Boru - "The Proclamation" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
The battle that John Brown begun - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
John Brown was a hero undaunted, true and brave - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
To join the ironies with Old John Brown - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
As Bruce's followers shed the Baliol's blood - Delta "Lines Written in the Isle of Bute" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXVIII, v.LIV, Dec. 1843]
Demons shriek'd as Brutus dealt the blow - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
Have we not our Brutuses - Taras Shevchenko "To the Dead" transl. by Alexander Jardine Hunter
Have come home laughing from the feast for Robert Burns - Mark Jarman "My Parents Have Come Home Laughing"
One flash of Byron's lightning - William Watson "On Exaggerated Deference to Foreign Literary Opinion"
No Byron for your Shelley - Dean Young "Son of Fog" [Poetry April 2005]
Caesar.
Cain.
Caligula and Nero knew a godliness akin to mine - Thomas M. Disch "Ballade of the New God"
The gaunt sons of Calvin's iron breed - James Russell Lowell "Agassiz"
The scent of nameless Calypsos - Ann K. Schwader "Of Ithaca & Ice"
Down all the stretch of Carpetbaggers - Alexander Posey "The Fall of the Redskin"
A gin-fountain smashed by Carrie Nation - Wallace Irwin "An Inside Con to Refined Guys"
Summer nights of lightning bugs and Johnny Cash - Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake "Someday I'll Love--"
Each town has its Cassandra - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Willingly accept Cassandra's Fate - Anne Killigrew "Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another"
So they cry out from stones as did Cassandra - Harry Martinson "Aniara 26" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
The eyes of anguish-stricken Cassiopeia - Edward Dowden "Andromeda"
A humble cloud can bust the lamp of Cassiopeta [sic] - John Grey "Skywatching"
From which Castor and Pollux hatched - Marianne Moore "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'"
Cato, true to parchment laws, protests with rigid hands - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Celine who pinned the moon to a page - Michael Waters "Homo Sapiens" [Poetry, January 1988]
Her Cerberus grew far more heads than most - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
With Cerberus to guard its portals - Edward Burrough Brownlow "Orpheus"
Remorse, more dread than Cerberus' growl - Madeleine Sweeny Miller "Sonnet to Nemesis, Goddess of Remorse"
Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born - John Milton "L'Allegro"
Ceres.
Charon.
Charybdis which in ruts appears - "The Nine Holes of the Links of St. Andrews: II. The Second or Cartgate Hole"
So shall Charybdis wear a grace - Arthur Quiller-Couch "The Splendid Spur"
If Charybdis seize our keel - Edmund Clarence Stedman "Penelope"
To stammer where old Chaucer used to sing - John Keats "Endymion, Book I [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]"
Ere Cheops had builded his pyramid - Charles Mair "The Voice of the Pines"
Chicken little in a broken shell - Paul Bernstein "Day One of the Deluge"
Chiron in broken bathroom light - Beasa A. Dukes "After Watching 'Moonlight'"
We supped instead each night on Chopin - Rita Dove "Transit"
Finding sense under mad Chopin's mask - Constance Fenimore Woolson "Commonplace" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.11, no.23, Feb. 1873]
That Kronos' dreaded scythe was shivered - Friedrich Schiller "Reproach-To Laura"
The cracked tune that Chronos sings - William Butler Yeats "The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
If Chronos comes to Hecate's door - Cynthia Zarin "Orbit"
State praises flow from lofty-sounding Cicero - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Cimmerian depths of mystery and sin - Iris Tree "Streets"
And Caesar into Cincinnatus grew - Delta "Stanzas Written After the Funeral of Admiral Sir David Milne, G.C.B." [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLVI, v.LVII, June 1845]
Far from Cinderella's dainty glass slippers - Cynthia Manick "A Taste of Blue"
Whom first Cincinnatus did doom - Mrs. A. Ritson "Classical Enigmas"
Circe.
When the haughty Cleopatra sailed to meet her Roman Mars - Laurens Maynard "Ave Post Saecula"
The serpent's tooth saved Cleopatra - Lola Ridge "The Woman with Jewels"
In Cleopatra's stormy bacchanal - Francis Brett Young "To Lydia Lopokova: Her Variety"
In meads where blue Clitumnus shines - Rev. James Gilborne Lyons "A Welcome Sacrifice" [Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, no.428, 13 March 1852]
I'll take whatever prize sage Clotho gives - Friedrich Schiller "To the Fates"
Cole Porter never wrote a song about us - Ishmael Reed "Skin Tight"
Consult Coleridge on the Imagination - Stanley Moss "Winter Flowers"
The faith thrice broken that incurred Columbia's vengeful sword - M.E. Thropp "The City of Mexico. Written While the War Was Pending" [Graham's Magazine v.XXII no.12, Dec. 1848]
To see and understand Pierrot and Columbine - Arthur Davison Ficke "A Watteau Melody"
Columbus's doom-burdened caravels - J.C. Squire "Sonnet [There was an Indian]"
The silence of lost Cosmonauts - Daisy Aldan "The Sky Is Moving Farther Back, Opaque"
Coyote.
More treasure than Croesus ever saw - Clarence Butler "We Two" [The Continental Monthly v.4 no.5, Nov. 1863]
Makes him richer than Croesus in gold - Rudolph Valentino "Cap and Bells (To F.)"
The people Cromwell taught - Roger Casement "Oliver Cromwell 1650-1659"
Centuries dark with Cromwell's name - James T. Fields "On a Portrait of Cromwell"
Not slain by Cromwell's sword - T.M. Kettle "Ulster (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling)"
With mighty Cromwell and tall King Saul - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
Cupid.
Mother of Stone, Cybele - Stephen Yenser "Petition on Santorini"
They raze Cygnus with worries for the next day - John Grey "Skywatching"
And Dedalus left for the sky - Etel Adnan "Night"
daedalus fly your wings - Elizabeth Bartlett "ekstasis"
Waxen wings by Daedalus designed - James Beattie "Epistle to the Honourable C. B."
Did he blame Daedalus, his father? - Wendy A. Shaffer "Icarus"
Every heart sets up its separate Dagon - G.H.H. "Night and Morning" (from The Knickerbocker, v. 23:3, March 1844)
Deflected Dali's softening emissions - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
Can't escape from Dali's dream - Richard Solomon "Dream Caused by the Fight of the Bumblebee"
Oh Danaë to this spring of cosmic gold - D.H. Lawrence "Tommies in the Train"
Rich as the shower of Danaë - H. Perceval "Callirhoe"
You're not the only lion after Daniel - Wallace Irwin "An Inside Con to Refined Guys"
Dante [allusion].
Dainty as Daphne's divinest - Howard Futhey Brinton "The Spring Violet"
Resound with echoes of Daphne's name - Henry S. Leigh "The Two Ages"
having flung d'artagnan clear to luna's tepid stone - Andy Miller "All Those Bleached Bones"
Thrust into the Darwinian claw - Mary Jo Bang "E Is Everywhere"
Darwin dreams of orchids - Mary Jo Bang "The Expression of Emotions"
Give us Darwin's eyes - Vachel Lindsay "The Scientific Aspiration"
May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin - James Russell Lowell "Credidimus Jovem Regnare"
David [Allusion, biblical].
The afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora - D.H. Lawrence "Dreams Old and Nascent" [David Copperfield and Dora Spenlow]
Beyond the Skill of Doctor Dee - "Mundus Foppensis" [PG lists 'Dubious author: John Evelyn"]
As Demeter mourned through many-fountained Enna - Arthur Stringer "Hephaestus"
Envied not Demosthenes his Greek - Aldous Huxley "Formal Verses II"
How Demosthenes walk'd on the beach - Henry S. Leigh "The Gift of the Gab"
The last echoes of Diana's horn - George Meredith "Appreciation"
Child thieves out of a Dickens novel - Theodora Goss "Goldilocks and the Bear"
When Emily's deathly fly calls to her - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Emily Dickinson]
Dickinson retreating yet getting brighter - Dean Young "Winged Purposes" [Poetry Feb. 2009] [probably the asteroid named for Terence Dickinson]
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Dionysus.
The purple flowers of Dis burn their young foreheads - Humbert Wolfe "THE WOODCUTTERS OF HÜTTELDORF"
Diadems drop and Doges surrender - Emily Dickinson "Book 1: Time and Eternity IV"
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Profiles forsworn to Donatello - Mina Loy "The Black Virginity"
The afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora - D.H. Lawrence "Dreams Old and Nascent" [David Copperfield and Dora Spenlow]
Sidestepped Duchamp's fractured descent - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
The melancholy strain of Echo - William Anderson "Landscape Lyrics No.XII--Twilight"
Echo hath taken the song - Clark Ashton Smith "Requiescat"
Blood supplemented with Edison and Tesla's currents - Kyle Dargan "Dear Echo" [Poetry Feb. 2016]
Each step of Edward's conquering host - Felicia Hemans "Wallace's Invocation to Bruce"
Einstein permitting himself multitudes - CM Burroughs "God Letter"
Misaligned marbles worthy of Elgin - Mary Jo Bang "A Tour of the March Equinox"
Elisha's Bears may even now be on the Stairs - Lady Helena Carnegie and Mrs Arthur Jacob "Heartless Folly"
When Emily's deathly fly calls to her - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Emily Dickinson]
To hang over Endymion's sleep - Matthew Arnold "Isolation: To Marguerite"
So shall Endymion faithful prove - Ronsard "To the Moon" transl. by Andrew Lang
That Endymion sighed to yield his spirit - H.T. Tuckerman "Luna.--An Ode" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIV no.5, May 1849]
The letters which Endymion wrote - Oscar Wilde "On the Sale by Auction of Keats' Love Letters"
Who got to Paradise, like Enoch, without dying - Stanley Moss "Winter Flowers"
Eros.
Back to English gardens after Euclid's linear - Anne Spencer "Life-Long, Poor Browning..." [Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, ed. by Countee Cullen, 1927]
her clothes hamper full of Euclidean geometry - upfromsumdirt (Ron Davis) "Ogechi Hula-Hoops The Rings Of Saturns"
Seek relief from the Eumenides of woe - Charlotte Bronte "Frances"
Dear to the Eumenides, and to all the heavenly brood - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Fate"
Sweeter than Euphrosyne's tongue - Robert Nichols "A Faun's Holiday"
In Euripides' great wake they are swept up - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Eurydice [allusion].
Eve [Biblical allusion].
The unrivall'd Falstaff of the ground - "The First Hole at St. Andrews on a Crowded Day"
Like Falstaff, seeks repose and dreams of glory - J. Fairfax McLaughlin writing as Pasquino "The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons"
Father Time oils his clocks - Dom "Number Cruncher: Here's a Crowd"
They never fool Old Father Time - Rudolph Valentino "Cap and Bells (To F.)"
Which folded Faust in joy elysian - Benjamin West Ball "To D.S.H."
What the FBI already downloaded - Jameka Williams "Self-Care is a Psy-Op"
Wolf blood and Fenrir lines that chill the bone - Robert Frazier "The Mutant Forests of Mars"
Foucault lectures to the ghosts of crows - Mónica Alexandra Jiménez "Theft"
All the birds in grace sigh at Saint Francis - Paul Cameron Brown "Casha"
Scorner of Midas and St. Francis - Arthur Davison Ficke "To John Cowper Powys, on His 'Confessions'"
Like good Saint Francis scatters crumbs of Hope - Oliver Herford "William Dean Howells"
What St. Francis called a mystery - Ira Sadoff "The Soul"
A Dr. Frankenstein in the lab with herself - Elizabeth Knapp "Self-Portrait as Cindy Sherman's Instagram Account"
Shelving Freud with Marx - Ruth Lechlitner "Lines for the Year's End"
How Frida had risen to see her double world - Yusef Komunyakaa "Frida's Earth Mother" [Frida Kahlo]
When Robert's snowy woods glow with an unearthly light - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Robert Frost]
Reading Frost on the subway - Sarah Getty "That Woman"
Fury/Furies.
The canvas on loan from Gabriel - Chris Dombrowski "See that my grave is swept clean"
And Gabriel's trumpet blow for you - Amy Lowell "Evelyn Ray"
Sings to me with the power of Gabriel's trumpet - Keith Taylor "What's Needed Now"
And Sir Galahad lies hid - Robert Graves "Babylon"
a Galatea in Python too cold to share a bed with - Caroline Mao "When My Father Reprograms My Mother {"
Whisper in the ears of Galileo - Linda Pastan "Time Travel"
In the fearful time of Gallia's madness - C. "The Young Grey Head" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXVIII, v.LIII, Feb. 1843]
When Ganesh marries my mother - Mike Allen "The Journey to Kailash"
Ganymede fleeing on a temple frieze - Dan Chiasson "Tackle Football"
Nature's self thy Ganymede - Abraham Cowley "The Grasshopper"
Who bore St George's standards o'er the deep - Delta "Stanzas Written After the Funeral of Admiral Sir David Milne, G.C.B." [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLVI, v.LVII, June 1845]
singing Gershwin in the backyard - Sarah Kay "In the House With No Doors"
The band of Gideon roam the sky - Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. "The Band of Gideon"
When Allen's rebel howl bares sharp canines - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Allen Ginsberg]
That won't be improved by adding Godzilla - Andre F. Peltier "Ishirou Honda to the Edge of Panic"
Gog and Magog to the fray - Arthur Cleveland Coxe "Onward"
the damage is always goldilocks style - Cislyn Smith "Borrower"
Had laid Goliaths in the dust - John Castillo "Old Sam! or the Effects of the Gospel"
Gorgon.
Goth/Gothic.
Transpose Jesus onto the Grateful Dead - Taylor Byas "Conversion: On Cincinnati's Converted Churches, God, and Lucifer"
Fear of waking up as Gregor Samsa - Xander Gershberg "Codename Beast: A Sestina"
In the dark recess where one weeps for Grendel - Shutta Crum "Always, there are mothers"
Stranger than anything Mr. Wells could have ever imagined - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [H.G. Wells]
Hades.
The ghost of Hamlet's father wandering through - Martin Espada "Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks"
No Hamlet hold my jaws and speak - Carl Sandburg "Bones"
Where Hammurabi made firm wings of law - Lou Barrett "Fertile Crescent"
Contemplate how to defeat our Hannibal - Tanque R. Jones "Scipio"
And Hannibal still hero of the Alps - Joaquin Miller "As It Is Written"
Harlequin.
Harmodius' sword bright flashing through the gloom - E. A. Warriner "Battle of the Wilderness" [The Continental Monthly v.6 no.2, August 1864]
When fair Hebe left the sky - Mrs. A. Ritson "Classical Enigmas"
Hecate.
Hector's sword is asleep from war - Stephen Vincent Benet "The First Vision of Helen"
Scattered by Hector's dogs - Amaud Jamaul Johnson "Tar Baby"
Nearer pace brave Hector, reckless Paris - Henrietta Cordelia Ray "The Venus of Milo"
Where Heisenberg's rules are reflexive - Richard Chwedyk "Rich and Pam Go to Fermilab and Later See a Dead Man"
Heat shimmer veils Heisenberg details - David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Mike Allen "Rattlebox"
Helen (allusion).
Which Hephaistos did build - W. Wilfred Campbell "Phaethon"
Join Hercules' cult to Mammon's - Ruben Dario "To Roosevelt" transl. unknown per poets.org
Protege of trickster Hermes - Mike Allen "Picasso's Rapture"
Hermes, god of cheats and chatter - "London Lyrics: The Auctioneer's Ode to Mercury" [The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction v.13, no.365, 11 April 1829]
Hermes' whisper in the flutes - Edwin Markham "Song of the Followers of Pan"
Hermes waits to lead me home - Jessie M.E. Saxby "Persephone: A Lay of Spring" [Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 5th series, no.114-v.III, 6 March 1886]
In the noise of Herod's silence - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Left nothing for the head of Holofernes - Mary Hickman "Everything Is Autobiography and Everything Is a Portrait"
Homer (allusion).
Houdini picks the locks of death - Kevin Goodan "Anaphora"
Houdini picking the locks of god - Kevin Goodan "Anaphora"
And Humpty Dumpty nobody can heal - Harry Martinson "Aniara 61" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
Hyperion divides the pillared vault of dark - Clark Ashton Smith "The Return of Hyperion"
Better than Years with Ibsen spent - Wallace Irwin "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr."
Icarus [allusion].
That mock the painted bow of Iris - L.A. Wilmer "To Mira" [Southern Literary Messenger v.II no.1 Dec. 1835-6]
Snows come and all my Isaacs die - Julia Alvarez "Winter Storm"
Isaac invented you in isolation - Mary Alexandra Agner "Be True" [context indicates Isaac Asimov by referencing the Three Laws of Robotics]
I'm yelling at Isaac Luria's grave - Mónica Gomery "The End Is the Beginning"
Supreme beyond Isaiah's dream - Benjamin Copeland "The Goal"
Rapt Isaiah strikes the heavenly lyre - George Santayana "King's College Chapel"
Played Iscariot to your Pythias - Frank Horne "Letters Found Near a Suicide" [Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, ed. by Countee Cullen, 1927]
Mocks sad-eyed Ishtar and her mourning maids - William Talbot Allison "There Sat the Women Weeping for Thammuz"
Ishtar in the ship of life - Laura Kasischke "Champagne"
Isis deep in the seasons - Cal Bedient "Expulsion"
At the veiled Isis in its keep - James Russell Lowell "Credidimus Jovem Regnare"
Scarce rival Isis on her fairer tide - U.T. "The College.--A Sketch in Verse" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCIII, v.LXV, May 1849]
Across the blue of Isis' veil - Helen Hay Whitney "East and West"
Give me the death of Tristan and Isolde - Adolf Wolff "The Call of Sex"
While Israfel loud chanted from the Void - Wallace Irwin "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr."
And heard the horn of Ivanhoe - Sidney Royse Lysaght "First Horizons"
With a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel - John Keats "Hyperion"
Lest Jack Frost should their pumpkin harm - William E. Barton "The Story of a Pumpkin Pie"
When old Jack Frost would never get a single try - Sydney Dayre "A Letter to Mother Nature" [Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad (ed. by Daphne Dale), 1894]
Lost to the rebel knave, Jack Frost - Henry van Dyke "The Ruby-Crowned Kinglet"
The shoes Jack Giant-killer wore - James Beattie "Epistle to the Honourable C. B."
Sketch a Jackson Pollock splatter of concrete poetry - Regie Cabico "A Carpapalooza: An American Anthem"
Like the Dream-ladder Jacob slept by - Martha Walker Cook "Clouds: Rain Clouds. Respectfully Dedicated to Professor Guyot" [The Continental Monthly v.5 no.3, March 1864]
Shapes like those in Jacob's dream - James H. Cousins "The Railway Arch"
Climbs the ladder Jacob saw - Nancy Luce "No Comfort"
The traffic of Jacob's ladder - Francis Thompson "The Kingdom of God"
Looked Janus-faced to innocence and guilt - William Wetmore Story "A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem"
As Jason heard in violet seas - Louis Golding "Prophet and Fool"
Foolish Jason on a treacherous sea - Sidney Lanier "Corn" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.15, no.86, Feb. 1875]
With Jason ventured for the fated Golden Fleece - "The Modern Argonauts" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no. CCCXV, v.LXVII, May 1850]
The towers of Jason's sea-girt city - Bayard Taylor "Hylas"
From the matrix of Jefferson's imagination - Kiki Petrosino "The Maiden"
Jehovah of acorns, watchtower of the thunders - Stanley Kunitz "The Testing-Tree"
And Jeremiah mourns Jerusalem - George Santayana "King's College Chapel"
Transpose Jesus onto the Grateful Dead - Taylor Byas "Conversion: On Cincinnati's Converted Churches, God, and Lucifer"
Jesus leaned on the cornerstone - Brandon O'Brian "Population Changes"
Quiet Jews robed in earth and light - Mike Allen "Chagall's Lamp"
We do not think why hate Jezebel? - Anne Carson "Thunderstorm Stack"
The jezebels are coming for us - Andre F. Peltier "The Love Theme from Switchblade Sisters"
Dirt from Jim Morrison's grave for a voice - Denise Dumars "The Golem"
Levelled with the life of Job - King Charles I "A Royal Lamentation"
For the lost terrains of Xanadu or Johannes Kepler - Robert Frazier "A Feel for the Heavens"
The battle that John Brown begun - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
John Brown was a hero undaunted, true and brave - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
To join the ironies with Old John Brown - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
Since I've become John Doe - Diane Raptosh "American Amnesiac [The self is a thousand localities]"
Toward the greenroom of John Wilkes Booth - Paul Gregory Nauert "Leaping Through the Centuries"
Summer nights of lightning bugs and Johnny Cash - Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake "Someday I'll Love--"
Was such sensation Jonah's doom - Charlotte Bronte "Gilbert II: The Parlour"
When leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger - Adrienne Rich "Yom Kippur 1984"
Jonah wept within the whale - Leonora Speyer "To a Song of Sappho discovered in Egypt"
Like the gourd which Jonas had - Simon Wastell "Man's Mortality"
Joseph's fat cattle and atrophied kine - "Britain's Prosperity: A New Song, which Ought to Have Been Sung by the Premier at the Opening of Parliament" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXIV, v.LXVII, Apr. 1850]
Jove.
Yet Judith, till her war was won - Vachel Lindsay "A Rhyme for All Zionists: The Eyes of Queen Esther, and How they Conquered King Ahasuerus"
Insofar as Juliet is the sun - Carolina Ebeid "Punctum/Metaphor"
Follow where his Juliet calls - Richard Le Gallienne "Cor Cordium"
The blossoms from Juliet's breast - James Oppenheim "A Handful of Dust"
Juno.
Jupiter.
Kafka's number one fan - Chen Chen "Kafka's Axe & Michael's Vest"
Too late to ask Kafka what he thinks - Dean Young "I Am But a Traveller in this Land & Know Little of Its Ways"
For the lost terrains of Xanadu or Johannes Kepler - Robert Frazier "A Feel for the Heavens"
Khrushchev took a crystal submarine down - Catherynne M. Valente "Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985"
Old King Cotton's dead and buried - "Corn Is King" [The Continental Monthly v.2 no.2, March 1862]
Into Dante's Kinsey scaled inferno - Brody Parrish Craig "Us Let the Radio Play Along & I"
While Kipling's banjo strings blaspheme a sacred text - T.M. Kettle "Ulster (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling)"
Midas' gold or Krupp's iron wealth secured - Paul Cameron Brown "The Treasure Ships"
The Lady of the Lake presiding over the bridge - Anthony Butts "Eight Modes toward Desire"
Laertes at his sister's grave bids violets spring - H.T. Tuckerman "To the Violet" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIII no.4, Oct. 1848]
Where Lancelot and Tristram vigil keep - Maurice Baring "In Memoriam, A.H. (Auberon Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas, R.F.C.; killed November 3, 1916)"
And taught King Lear how to wear a crown of straw - Marin Sorescu "Shakespeare" transl. by Michael Hamburger
Sheltered Lear on the blasted heath - Jo Walton "The Godzilla Sonnets: ii) Godzilla in Shakespeare"
Whiter still than Leda's love - John Keats "Endymion, Book I [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]"
Will a new LEONARDO arise on our ken? - Bulwer Lytton publishing as Owen Meredith "Lucile: Part I Canto II"
Leonardo's paints on canvas live - Russell W. Davenport "Poems IX"
Can follow Leonardo's rapid brush - Russell W. Davenport "Poems IX"
Leviathan.
Where the lost Lilith went - Bliss Carman "Song"
And Lilith roses dipped in wine - Joyce Kilmer "Ballade of My Lady's Beauty"
With the heart of Lilith - Edna St Vincent Millay [untitled sonnet]
Who saw Lincoln stand up before the faces of a city - Witter Bynner "This Man"
Each a Lincoln in his smoldering patience - Helen Keller "The Song of the Stone Wall"
Lir's vast host of shouting water - "Tempest on the Sea" transl. by Robin Flower
Marks the reddened feet of the Followers of Lot - Nada Almosa "Queer Arab Dictionary"
Not unlike Lot's wife - Amaud Jamaul Johnson "No More Birminghams"
Lucifer.
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride - T.S. Eliot "A Cooking Egg"
Some elusive bog-buried Lucy - Mary Jo Bang "I Could Have Been Better"
All we have is the echo of Luke Skywalker - Deron Eckert "Luke Skywalker Could Do a Lot of Things"
Their might hearts swelling loved Luna to greet - "Asleep" [The Continental Monthly v.6 no.3, Sept. 1864]
Luna, with her star-gemmed, glorious crown - Rufus W. Griswold "The Sunset Storm" [Graham's Magazine v.XXI no.3, Sept. 1842]
having flung d'artagnan clear to luna's tepid stone - Andy Miller "All Those Bleached Bones"
I'm yelling at Isaac Luria's grave - Mónica Gomery "The End Is the Beginning"
Each a Luther in his fearless faith - Helen Keller "The Song of the Stone Wall"
A feather from Ma'at's radiant head - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
Recall to-day the glorious Maccabean rage - Emma Lazarus "The Banner of the Jew"
Where Macha's flame-tongued horses flee - Thomas Boyd "The King's Son"
Greed, like a gorged Machiavelli - Maxwell Bodenheim "American Vaudeville Show"
Our court schemes are too profound for Machiavel himself - John Gay "Fable LII: Vulture, Sparrow, and Birds" [edited, updated, & adapted by John Benson Rose]
Leader without Machiavellian teeth - Justin Rovillos Monson "Institutional(ized) Political Poem, or Poem for Disputed Territories"
A smile of Sarcophagi, Sun-gods, and Madonnas - Daisy Aldan "Everywhere in Constancy, He Is Intoning, Look! Look!"
Maenad.
And watched Magellan's white-winged ships - Sharlot M. Hall "The West"
Gog and Magog to the fray - Arthur Cleveland Coxe "Onward"
Mammon.
With Chairman Mao himself chasing us - Chen Chen "First Light"
The ghost of Marius walks to-night - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Where exiled Marius lurk'd in fear - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Marlowe hurled forth huge stars - Muriel Stuart "Words"
Mars.
Tune up the poems performed to Marsyas' flute - Bob Holman "Scotty and the Rib Tips"
The world was filled with talking Martís - Mara Pastor "Los Bustos de Martí/The Busts of Martí" transl. by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong
Shelving Freud with Marx - Ruth Lechlitner "Lines for the Year's End"
The eyes of Mary Magdalene - Jean Blewett "The Two Marys"
Lost whispers of the Magdalen - N. Scott Momaday "Spectre"
I do not want what Mary Shelley made - Mary Alexandra Agner "Book of the Dead Woman"
While pale Medea culled her deadly flowers - Maurice Baring "Le Prince Errant"
To undertake Medea's rescuing eyes - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Medea's soft and deadly name - Louise Imogen Guiney "The White Sail"
For Medea's wondrous alchemy - Percy Bysshe Shelley "Alastor: or, the Spirit of Solitude"
A Medici through to my soul - Jess Nevins "My Last Duke"
Medusa.
Making Melville eat his whale - Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Autobiography"
The beautiful geometry of Mendel's peas and their grim logic - Rita Dove "Family Reunion"
And lean Menelaus is smiling sleet - Stephen Vincent Benet "The Last Vision of Helen"
Mephisto never yet was caught beneath false colors - Oliver Herford "Mephisto"
Yet when Mephisto would foreclose - Oliver Herford "Mephisto"
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Mercury.
Breath of mystic times and Merlin sage - L. Rice-Oxley "The Opening of the Grave of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury"
If old Methuselah's years were mine - Charlotte F. Bates "Contrasted Moods" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.XVII, no.98, Feb. 1876]
Uriel and Michael were your sons - Vachel Lindsay "To Eve, Man's Dream of Wifehood as Described by Milton"
Covered by St. Michael's shield - Polonski "On Skobelef" transl. by John Pollen
Michelangelo's dark daughter Night - Charles Baudelaire "The Ideal" transl. not credited
Michelangelo enameled in cerulean - Dan Chiasson "Bloom (II)"
Who pulled my braids and boasted about meeting Mickey Mouse - Leonora Simonovis "Little Bruja"
Midas [allusion].
Milton [allusion].
Minerva.
Dodged Miro's famished halo of animalcules - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
Having come from Mithraic light - Stephen Kuusisto "Dark Joys 18"
Mithridates, he died old - A.E. Housman "A Shropshire Lad LXII"
The luring laugh of Moira - Clinton Scollard "The Wonders"
Moloch.
The bombs, the explosives, and Molotovs are overhead - Regie Cabico "Morning After the Election"
The breeze watches it all with her Mona Lisa smile - Norla Chee "Navajo Mountain"
Monet grew his gardens - Atticus "Love Her Wild"
Where the Mongol steeds never galloped - Rachel Rodman "The Past Is a Foreign Country"
Dirt from Jim Morrison's grave for a voice - Denise Dumars "The Golem"
Moses.
Mozart.
Muse.
Naiad.
The mute Napoleon of the brain - Alexander Anderson "A Blackbird's Nest" [Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 5th series, no.28-v.I, 12 July 1884]
Revisions to the Napoleon machine - Mary Jo Bang "For the Final Report"
The northern streamers paled Napoleon's lurid star - "The Fireman's Song" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
Above the pillar of Napoleon's pride - Alexander Pushkin "A Monument" transl. by John Pollen
Narcissus.
A gin-fountain smashed by Carrie Nation - Wallace Irwin "An Inside Con to Refined Guys"
Be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar - Eric Gamalinda "Factory of Souls"
The sacred way to Nebuchadnezzar's throne - William Carlos Williams "March"
The Nefertiti fake chipped on the run - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
That fought that day with Nelson at the Nile - "The Fireman's Song" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
Dead Nelson and his half-dead crew - Thomas Hardy "Trafalgar"
Two guitars fighting over the same late career Willie Nelson - Sophie Fink "The Dogs Don't Forgive Us"
Nemesis without a zipper for escape - Erin Belieu "She Returns to the Water"
Nemesis is knocking at the door - Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]"
Neptune.
Nereids who dwell in wet caves - H.D. "Acon"
Where Nereid maids about the sea-god throng - Rennell Rodd "At Lanuvium"
The luring airs of Nereid or Siren - Edmund Clarence Stedman "Penelope"
The Nereid of a moment - Arthur Symons "Stella Maris"
Nero [allusion].
Poets from the old days of Netzahualcoyotl - Ruben Dario "To Roosevelt" transl. unknown per poets.org
And hang fresh wreaths round Newton's awful brow - Anna Laetitia Barbauld "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"
All Newton's laws don't apply to us the same - Joshua Bennet "Owed to the Plastic on Your Grandmother's Couch"
Leap beyond the mind of Newton - Alfred Noyes "Darwin I: Chance and Design"
Repeat Nietzsche's recurring passion - Etel Adnan "Night"
Nietzsche between drying coats - Julia Alvarez "Manholes"
Between calculus and Nietzsche - Sue Budin "Looking for My Brother's Grave"
Why Nietzsche sought his soul's sympathy - Philip Schultz "Googling Ourselves"
Who once had wept like Niobe - Walter Richard Cassels "Spring"
The Niobe of nations - Arthur M. Forrester "The Tide Is Turning"
The fate of the Olympus-stricken Niobe - "The Misanthrope"
Noah.
The cold Norns who pattern life and rest - Bliss Carman "The White Gull"
Here shine the valiant Nunio's deeds unfeign'd - Luís de Camões "The Lusiad; or, The Discovery of India: Book I. Argument" transl. by William Julius Mickle
That haunt King Oberon's domains - Benjamin West Ball "Elfin Land"
Rul'd by Imperial Oberon's hand - Catherine Ann Turner Dorset "Think Before You Speak; Or, The Three Wishes"
Odin.
Sharks should pass Odysseus by - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers "Blues: Odysseus"
The thing that motivated Odysseus - Keith Taylor "The Sickness That Comes from the Longing for Home"
Think of the remorse of Oedipus - Frank Bidart "California Plush"
Old Nick upon his fingers tended - John Gay "Fable XLII: Juggler and Vice" [edited, updated, & adapted by John Benson Rose]
Round a plantation of Old Nick's - Charles G. Leland "The Last Ditch" [The Continental Monthly v.2 no.2, March 1862]
Like the drowned Ophelia fair - Benjamin West Ball "L'Envoi"
Ophelia in her small lake - Mary Jo Bang "Z Is for Zed at the End"
A kiss can resuscitate the drowned Ophelia - Joseph O. Legaspi "The Kisser's Handbook"
For Oppenheimer's optimal blossom - Ann K. Schwader "In the Burned Places"
Airy shapes of Oreads circling free - Eleanor Farjeon "Pan-Worship"
Hear the Oread's laughter pealing - Robert Nichols "A Faun's Holiday"
With Orestes through the mart - Louis Golding "Down Tottenham Court Road"
Orion.
Orpheus.
Osiris.
Where Ozymandius the strong lies in colossal ruin - J.B. Tabb "Shelley" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.26, July 1880]
Or Pallas wake her sounding lyre - "Superior Nonsense Verses"
Wretched Palomides whom dreams torment - Stephen Vincent Benet "Two at the Crossroads"
Pan (Deity).
laughing as he changed the lyrics about Pancho Villa - ire'ne lara silva "me llamo viento"
Pandora [allusion].
The shadow stitchery of Paracelsus and Prometheus' fire - Sonya Taaffe "The Chymical Marriage"
The sharp and thirsty blood of Paris - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Nearer pace brave Hector, reckless Paris - Henrietta Cordelia Ray "The Venus of Milo"
While the coat cut for Peter is pass'd on to Paul - Bulwer Lytton publishing as Owen Meredith "Lucile: Part I Canto II"
To the waverer be an emblem of St Paul's content - Delta "A Wild-Flower Garland: The Daisy" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine no.CCCXX, v.LXVIII, Oct. 1850]
And down the wings of Pegasus would fold - Tomas de Iriarte "Epistle to Don Domingo de Iriarte, on His Travelling to Various Foreign Courts" [Modern Poets and Poetry of Spain 1860 ed. and transl. by James Kennedy]
Houses Pegasus and Equules in its dusty windows - John Grey "Skywatching"
Preferring Pegasus to any cart - Gustav Melby "The Lost Chimes"
A troth as just as had Penelope - Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey "The Excellency of His Love"
Penelope, who usurps and dishonors nothing - Philip Schultz "Luxury: One"
Persephone/Proserpine.
The careless grace my Perseus wears - Edward Dowden "Andromeda"
In the name of Peter's luck - Maikof (Apollon Maykov) "Who Was He? A Story of Peter the Great" transl. by John Pollen
While the coat cut for Peter is pass'd on to Paul - Bulwer Lytton publishing as Owen Meredith "Lucile: Part I Canto II"
As Peter's chains dropped for the Angel - Edith Wharton "The First Year [All Souls' Day]"
Imprisoned in one of Petrarch's sonnets - Pablo Neruda "The Book of Questions: X" transl. by William O'Daly
The pale unsistered Phaedra - Louise Imogen Guiney "The White Sail"
Pharaoh.
A fig for the Philistine slander - William Hodgson Ellis "The Lyric League"
And Phillis Wheatley prayed - January Gill O'Neil "Old South Meeting House"
Phoebus.
Nor turn your lips away from Phryne's silver limbs - Muriel Stuart "The New Aspasia"
A batch of Picasso's passion flowers - Lou Barrett "Time's Fool"
Picasso dipped his brush in their tears - Diane DeCillis "Weeping Women"
To see and understand Pierrot and Columbine - Arthur Davison Ficke "A Watteau Melody"
The white Pierrot, wreathed in smoke - Amy Lowell "Stravinsky's Three Pieces, 'Grotesques,' for String Quartets: Second Movement"
Foretold a dreadful doom for Pilate - Charlotte Bronte "Pilate's Wife's Dream"
A beggar Pilate rates thee - Michael Field "Blessed Are the Beggars Matt. v. 3"
Aquamarine Pisces gems for eyes - Denise Dumars "The Golem"
Half breed son of Pisces and Aquarius - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
And drove the proud Plantagenet before him - Robert Chambers "To Scotland" [Spirit of Chambers' Journal, 1834, Project Gutenberg]
The regal wine of Tudors or Plantagenets - Henry S. Leigh "To a Timid Leech"
Plato
Pleiades.
Pluto/Plutonian.
Sketch a Jackson Pollock splatter of concrete poetry - Regie Cabico "A Carpapalooza: An American Anthem"
From which Castor and Pollux hatched - Marianne Moore "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'"
Cole Porter never wrote a song about us - Ishmael Reed "Skin Tight"
Poseidon's burnished axle drifts - Benjamin West Ball "The Penitent"
Poseidon's voice sounds in the storm - Lewis Morris "The Epic of Hades book I: Tartarus: Phaedra"
Enough wealth to dazzle a Prester John - Paul Cameron Brown "The Treasure Ships"
The purple country of Prester John - G.K. Chesterton "The Ballad of the White Horse: Book VIII. The Scouring of the Horse"
A tale of Prester John - Vachel Lindsay "The Golden Whales of California"
For this Priam's great city of Troy was sacrificed - Humbert Wolfe "Columbine"
Prometheus.
The necromancy of a Prospero holds in thrall - Don Marquis "A Golden Lad (D.V.M.)"
Prospero warned me against walking alone - Kiki Petrosino "The Wish"
Their barks are host to a protean foxfire - Bruce Boston & Robert Frazier "A Compass for the Mutant Rain Forest"
Which penned in Proteus' wizard circle sleep - T. Sturge Moore "Sent from Egypt with a Fair Robe of Tissue to a Sicilian Vine-Dresser 276 B.C."
The Protean shapes of evil - John Presland "To the Leaders of Both Parties January 1910"
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea - William Wordsworth "The World Is Too Much With Us"
Reading Proust backwards - Tan Lin "RPT MC-60 00.27 8"
Psyche.
A tiny lay Puck hath late unfolden - B.C. "Love Lights" [Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 5th series, no.10-v.I, 8 March 1884]
The winter of Puritan snows - George Santayana "Fair Harvard"
In Pushkin's clock-haunted house - Sir Geoffrey Hill "Genius Loci"
Even Puss in Boots will wish that he were in your shoes - G.K. Chesterton "To Enid who acted the Cat in private Pantomime"
Passeth Pygmalion's artifice - "The Pearl" transl. by Sophie Jewett
Which Pygmalion made and loved - Clark Ashton Smith "The Masque of Forsaken Gods"
Framed on Pythagorean plan - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Played Iscariot to your Pythias - Frank Horne "Letters Found Near a Suicide" [Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, ed. by Countee Cullen, 1927]
When Quijote roared his challenge to giants - Martin Espada "Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks"
Whipping Quijote's sword overhead - Martin Espada "Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks"
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
The apotheosis of Ra's rivals - James Hannaham "Apophasis Now"
A cowboy in the boat of Ra - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
The voice of Rachel mourning - Emma Lazarus "By the Waters of Babylon"
Azrael's eyes upon her, Raphael's wings above - Rudyard Kipling "Jane's Marriage"
One of Raphael's angels held within this hush - David St. John "In the High Country"
Illumination in the manner of Rembrandt - John Moncure Wettarau "Too Big"
Where Reynard's paw could not molest - Palmer Cox "The Brownies' Kites"
Had not sly Reynard's wits to lay a plot - John Gay "Fable IV: Jove's Eagle, and Murmuring Beasts" [edited, updated, & adapted by John Benson Rose]
Have come home laughing from the feast for Robert Burns - Mark Jarman "My Parents Have Come Home Laughing"
When Robert's snowy woods glow with an unearthly light - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Robert Frost]
Not Rockefeller's treasure chest - William Hodgson Ellis "Horace, Odes I. i."
Roland's horn resounds through ages - Mark Jarman "Song of Roland"
Roland's song comes down from the Pyrenees - Mark Jarman "Song of Roland"
Who blew Roland's vain blast - James Russell Lowell "The Cathedral"
Roland's ghost winding a silent horn - Edwin Arlington Robinson "Mr. Flood's Party"
Romeo's passion rose to fire from one thin spark - Thom Gunn "During an Absence"
Your heart holds many a Romeo - Arthur Symons "Stella Maris"
Rommel was kissing heaven's dainty hands - Tomaž Šalamun "We Build a Barn and Read Reader's Digest"
No tango in its Rorschach - Jaswinder Bolina "Portrait of the Self"
Knotted as rose of Sharon - Michael Field "Relics"
And loves like Ruth's of old no end - Ralph Hodgson "The Song of Honour"
To Ruth the eyes of Boaz shone clear light - Victor Hugo "Boaz Asleep" transl. not credited
Through the sad heart of Ruth - John Keats "Ode to a Nightingale"
Can spin Sagittarius into spider - John Grey "Skywatching"
Sagittarius has an arrow drawn at the very heart of Scorpio - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
By what law did Sagittarius make his squatter's claim - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
For saints, look under the saint's name. For example, Saint Francis would be under Francis.
Delirious feet of the Princess Salome - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Salome's dance is ended - Louis J. McQuilland "Ballade of Dead Favourites"
Fear of waking up as Gregor Samsa - Xander Gershberg "Codename Beast: A Sestina"
A Sampson of Titanic force - James H. Cousins "Copernicus"
Weighed us down as Samson in the temple - Fenton Johnson "The New Day"
Sensible as Sancho Panza - Clive Bell "The Legend of Monte della Sibilla"
Sappho [allusion].
Satan.
Saturn.
With mighty Cromwell and tall King Saul - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
Let David play the harp for Saul - Adrienne Rich "David's Boyhood"
A head that lies where Saul's has lain - Adrienne Rich "David's Boyhood"
Of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul - Ruben Dario "To Roosevelt" transl. unknown per poets.org
Waking under the fingernails of Scheherazade - Nathan Spoon "The Genie Speaks"
Sagittarius has an arrow drawn at the very heart of Scorpio - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
As Scorpio rises, Orion goes down - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
A Scylla in the form of rushes - "The Nine Holes of the Links of St. Andrews: II. The Second or Cartgate Hole"
Where Scythians roam beneath the pole - J.S.B. "Marathon" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCLXIII, v.LXXV, May 1854]
Blaze with the fire of Semele - C.H.B. Kitchin "Opening Scene from 'Amphitryon'"
Going into town after Set - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
Shahjahan's drunk elephants are marching - Salik Shah "Field Notes"
Shakespeare (Allusion).
Knotted as rose of Sharon - Michael Field "Relics"
But not like Sheba's queen - Frances Ridley Havergal "Coming to the King"
Became sharp flame to Shelley listening - Joseph Auslander "Is This the Lark!" [Unclear whether Percy is meant or Mary]
I do not want what Mary Shelley made - Mary Alexandra Agner "Book of the Dead Woman"
No Byron for your Shelley - Dean Young "Son of Fog" [Poetry April 2005] [presumably Percy Bysshe Shelley]
The object of Shiva's daily regimen - Surdas "Sur's Ocean 47: The Pangs and Politics of Love" transl. by John Stratton Hawley
Sibyl (allusion).
Where yet Silenus grasps the woodland cup - "A Farewell to Naples" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCXIII, v.LXVII, March 1850]
Till even flushed Silenus wakes - Robert Nichols "A Faun's Holiday"
Sinatra always plays on payday - Angela Liu "Dow Jones Dream"
Between silence and Sinatra - Bruce Smith "Garden"
That Sinbad once sailed to Gaza - Ammiel Alcalay "My Apologies"
To where Sirius barks behind huge Orion - Walter de la Mare "The Ride-by-Nights"
Sisyphus.
All we have is the echo of Luke Skywalker - Deron Eckert "Luke Skywalker Could Do a Lot of Things"
Socrates [allusion].
Solomon.
A Solon ponders till his Years are great - Wallace Irwin "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr."
Before a Solon had devised the laws - Friedrich Schiller "The Artists" transl. not credited
Whom Sophocles controls - Lionel Johnson "The Classics"
Red flag waving over Spartacus - Lola Ridge "Red Flag"
Only a bare mirror at night for the Spinning Boy - Tu Fu "I Will Be Alone" transl. not credited [The Jade Flute, c.1960, Project Gutenberg]
Had missed the news bulletin about Stalin - Edward Hirsch "My First Bookstore"
Shall not Strabo then respect command - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
To play the role of Tantalus - Harold Acton "The Prodigal Son"
tantalus drink your fill - Elizabeth Bartlett "ekstasis"
The reason tortured Tantalus is baited - Countee Cullen "Yet Do I Marvel"
Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus - Iris Tree "[How often, when the thought of suicide]"
In Tears for her Telemachus - Anne Killigrew "To my Lady Berkeley, Afflicted upon her Son, My Lord Berkeley's Early Engaging in the Sea-Service"
And with the stars outdance Terpsichore - Geoffrey Dearmer "Eight Sonnets VII"
Terpsichore ruled with unlimited sway - L.V.F. Randolph "Mrs. Rabothem's Party" [The Continental Monthly v.4 no.1, July 1863]
Blood supplemented with Edison and Tesla's currents - Kyle Dargan "Dear Echo" [Poetry Feb. 2016]
Replicant echoes in red earth and Tesla coils - Sonya Taaffe "The Chymical Marriage"
With Theseus' sons at danger's gates - J.S.B. "Marathon" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCLXIII, v.LXXV, May 1854]
Each original element like the ship of Theseus - Ted Mathys "Key to the Kingdom"
Three times reclined on Thetis' breast - James Beattie "Epistle to the Honourable C. B."
Thor and Odin held their battles by my side - "Danube and the Euxine" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXCVII, v.LXIV, Nov. 1848]
Quivered yet with savage hymns to Thor - J.R. Lowell "Merry England" [Graham's Magazine v.XIX no.5, Nov. 1841]
A thunderbolt by Vulcan forged for Thor - Herbert Randall "Plymouth Rock"
Thoth closed his book of records and wept - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
The weight of tech against Thoth's scale - Ann K. Schwader "Past Human"
Three musketeers of faithful following - Iris Tree "[Give me, O God, the power of laughter still]"
She borrows the heart from the Tin Man - G. O. Clark "Mary Has a Prophetic Vision"
Titan/Titanic.
Titania.
Through the land of Toulouse-Lautrec - Andre F. Peltier "The Love Theme from Switchblade Sisters"
Trees as tall as Tom Thumb - Paul Carroll "Song [To be able to walk along and see]"
No more let Rome exult in Trajan's name - Luís de Camões "The Lusiad; or, The Discovery of India: Book I. Argument" transl. by William Julius Mickle
Give me the death of Tristan and Isolde - Adolf Wolff "The Call of Sex"
Where Lancelot and Tristram vigil keep - Maurice Baring "In Memoriam, A.H. (Auberon Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas, R.F.C.; killed November 3, 1916)"
Triton.
The regal wine of Tudors or Plantagenets - Henry S. Leigh "To a Timid Leech"
Cavern'd shapes that Typhon bled - Jean de Esque "Betelguese"
The ugly duckling remained ugly - Dean Young "Speech Therapy" [Poetry Oct. 2010]
The phantom ship that brought Ulysses home - Maurice Baring "Greece"
Life-blood in the trench Ulysses made - Arthur Hugh Clough "The Shadow"
Though great Urania guide her flight - Conde Benoist Pallen "Maria Immaculata"
Look into the entrails of Uranus - Audre Lorde "A Woman Speaks"
Even gods must obey what's drawn from Urd's well - Christian Gullette "The Fates"
The spread wings of Uriel uplifted - Daisy Aldan "Everywhere in Constancy, He Is Intoning, Look! Look!"
Past the sceptre of Uriel - Benjamin West Ball "Ariel's Song"
Uriel and Michael were your sons - Vachel Lindsay "To Eve, Man's Dream of Wifehood as Described by Milton"
Rudolph Valentino of the moon - Frank O'Hara "To the Film Industry in Crisis"
Wild Valkyries ride the wind - Arthur Guiterman "The Twilight of the Gods"
How their heroes heard the Valkyriur call - Ione "The Songs of Our Fathers" [The Knickerbocker v.10, no.5, November 1837]
The Valkyriur call to the feast and song in Odin's hall - Ione "The Songs of Our Fathers" [The Knickerbocker v.10, no.5, November 1837]
Half lost in Van Gogh's swarm of colors - Yusef Komunyakaa "Cape Coast Castle"
Passing over the bewildered brilliance of van Gogh - Michael Waters "Homo Sapiens" [Poetry, January 1988]
And weep for Vashti's shame - Frances E.W. Harper "Vashti"
As Vashti used to do - John Masefield "Esther"
Venus.
A magic marker Venus de Milo - B. K. Fischer "Week 30 (Maternity Bathing Suit)"
laughing as he changed the lyrics about Pancho Villa - ire'ne lara silva "me llamo viento"
Whose domain holds Virgil's ashes - Giosue Carducci "Vincenzo Monti" transl. by Frank Sewall
Six ells of Virgil should the crime repair - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
Whom Virgil calms - Lionel Johnson "The Classics"
Beside me no Virgil - Donna Masini "A Gate"
Wear Virgo's diamond in your hair - John Grey "Skywatching"
Virgo halfway across the heavens - Charles Wright "Double Salt"
Voltaire knocks at his daughter's window - Mary Jo Bang "Ritual Gestures"
With Vulcan's rage and mutterings bold - E. Coungeau "To Selene"
These arrows by Vulcan were cunningly done - G. Peele "Cupid's Arrows" [The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction v.14, no.379, 4 July 1829]
A thunderbolt by Vulcan forged for Thor - Herbert Randall "Plymouth Rock"
and instead I woke you with Wagner - Logan February "I Woke You with Wagner,"
Wallace repell'd and smote the myriad foe - Robert Chambers "To Scotland" [Spirit of Chambers' Journal, 1834, Project Gutenberg]
When Walt's celebratory song becomes a post-apocalyptic dirge - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Walt Whitman]
Webster was much possessed by death - T.S. Eliot "Whispers of Immortality"
Stranger than anything Mr. Wells could have ever imagined - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [H.G. Wells]
And Phillis Wheatley prayed - January Gill O'Neil "Old South Meeting House"
Whitman out past Neptune - Dean Young "Winged Purposes" [Poetry Feb. 2009][presumably an asteroid, possibly one named for Walt Whitman, possibly one named for another Whitman]
When Walt's celebratory song becomes a post-apocalyptic dirge - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Walt Whitman]
Around the dainty tip of Whitman's pen - Frances S. Osgood "Lines to an Idea that Wouldn't 'Come'" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIV no.5, May 1849]
The Wild Huntsman that shoots the hares - Dr. Heinrich Hoffman "The Story of the Wild Huntsman"
Geese in flight become the Wild Hunt - Stephen Leggett "So Happy to Have a Coat with Pockets"
When William Carlos' red wheelbarrow transforms - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [William Carlos Williams]
Two guitars fighting over the same late career Willie Nelson - Sophie Fink "The Dogs Don't Forgive Us"
Wise Men lost on their way to Bethlehem - Martin Espada "Flowers and Bullets"
It was no help knowing Wordsworth - Kim Addonizio "Darkening Then Brightening"
And frightening the army of Xerxes away - Oliver Herford "An Alphabet of Celebrities"
'Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods - John Greenleaf Whittier "Snow-Bound"
The dim torch that Zarathustra blew on - Lola Ridge "Death Ray"
Zeus.
Navigation Links:
Go to author indices.
Go to word indices.
Go to category indices.
Groups of people named for geographic areas or for whom geographical regions are named (if I recognize them as such) will be in the other allusions document.
Some overlap with Supernatural/Religious. Things that aren't consistently proper nouns may be there instead.
Asking some stick, like Aaron's, to bud - James Russell Lowell "At the Commencement Dinner, 1866, in Acknowledging a Toast to the Smith Professor"
One faithful Abdiel may fearless brave unnumbered rebel foes - "Columbia's Safety" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.5, May 1862]
Wild as when Abel out of Eden died - Louise Imogen Guiney "On Some Old-Music"
And nettles strew the bosom of Abraham - Arthur Davison Ficke "To John Cowper Powys, on His 'Confessions'"
What Abraham was rich in - Philip Schultz "Luxury: Three"
Tracing a pigeon's god to Abraham - Keith S. Wilson "I Find Myself Defending Pigeons"
For the erring Absalom his father wept aloud - C.L.P. "Tidings of Victory" [The Continental Monthly v.6 no.6, Dec. 1864]
Caught still as Absalom - Isaac Rosenberg "Chagrin"
Achilles.
Adam (Allusion).
The sons of Agamemnon to their faith no longer true - "The Modern Argonauts" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no. CCCXV, v.LXVII, May 1850]
Great Agamemnon lifts his hand - J. Wareham "The Trojan War, 1915" [The Anzac Book: Written and Illustrated in Gallipoli by the Men of Anzac, 1916]
Ajax stands in the Trojan torchlight - John M. Ford "Troy: the Movie"
He fell as Ajax fell in Homer - Robert Hass "Heroic Simile"
Aladdin's wealth scarce mounted faster - W.P.P. "Epistle to the Editor" (The Knickerbocker v.23:5, May 1844)
Of rare Aladdin's wondrous cave - John Greenleaf Whittier "Snow-Bound"
Survey the stone where Alexander's ashes lay - Anna Laetitia Barbauld "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"
Her memories of Caesar, Alexander, the wolves on seven hills - Deborah Brown "Reprise"
Alexander's conquering star - Lewis Morris "Odatis"
Look'd scornful down on Alexander's might - Mrs. L.H. Sigourney "Bonaparte at St. Helena"
Like Alice through the looking-glass - Vachel Lindsay "A Doll's 'Arabian Nights'"
When Allen's rebel howl bares sharp canines - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Allen Ginsberg]
Where Amaryllis lies in state - Oscar Wilde "Theocritus"
An amazon of thought with sovereign eyes - Emma Lazarus "Chopin"
Dreamless long-dead Amen-hotep lies - Edward Thomas "Swedes"
Ammon's solar fount congeals - Benjamin West Ball "Concetto"
Ammut snapped up their hearts and swallowed - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
Egypt's Amun roused from sleep - John Greenleaf Whittier "Snow-Bound"
A grapestone choked Anacreon and hushed his song - Thomas Bailey Aldrich "Wyndham Towers"
Each town has its Andromache - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Our numbed faces are as stunned as Andromache's - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Mow through Andromeda spirals - Mike Allen "Deluge"
Prayed twice daily to Saint Anne - Chris Dombrowski "Comes to Worse"
To go see Anne Frank - Megan Fernandes "Amsterdam"
The last spark of Saint Anthony's fire - William Hodgson Ellis "Little White Crow"
And Antony with Egypt in his arms - Theodore Maynard "Sunset on the Desert"
Anubis endlessly brought forth the dead - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
Where Anubis was at his side - "The Story of Pyramid Thothmes"
Aphrodite with unbraided hair - Harold Acton "Lament for Adonis"
So rich in love's regret fair Aphrodite rose - Edward Carpenter "Aphrodite"
Ran to meet white Aphrodite risen from the sea - Olive Custance "Hyacinthus"
In aphroditic surreality to be preserved forever - Harry Martinson "Aniara 52: Shards from Mima" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
Apollo.
Aquarius is skewered by a sliver of sleep - John Grey "Skywatching"
Half breed son of Pisces and Aquarius - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
Arachne plies her gossamer loom - Benjamin West Ball "The Authoress of The Mysteries of Udolpho"
Arachne high did lift her cunning web - Edmund Spenser "The House of Richesse"
All Archimedean subtleties are vain - Benjamin West Ball "The Penitent"
Archimedes still holds his measured home - Joaquin Miller "As It Is Written"
Like the giddy Argonauts we were - Cyrus Cassells "Altitude"
And Argus not omniscience - Ken Chen "Brief Lives: Io" [excerpts]
Ariadne.
Ariel [allusion].
Citing something age-inappropriate from Aristotle - Joshua Bennett "You Are So Articulate With Your Hands"
Reread Aristotle by waning light - Alison Hawthorne Deming "Human Habitat"
Nor Aristotle the lore possessed - "The Pearl" transl. by Sophie Jewett
Simpler than in Aristotle's day - Arthur Waugh "The Learned Pig"
To Artemis my Queen - Edward Dowden "Atalanta"
Where Arthur's castle looms above - W. Wilfred Campbell "The World-Mother"
Of tourney won in Arthur's lists at Camelot - Martin I. Griffin "The Ride of Prince Geraint" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.XII, no.30, Sept. 1873]
Enjoyed the zeal of Arthur's rule - Herbert W. Hartman, Jr. "Dagonet"
Throws forty keys at Arthur's feet - Vachel Lindsay "Shantung, or the Empire of China Is Crumbling Down"
Dead as Ashtaroth's desire - Louis J. McQuilland "Immortal"
When Queen Ashtaroth beat at her lamp and fell - Humbert Wolfe "Columbine"
Isaac invented you in isolation - Mary Alexandra Agner "Be True" [context indicates Isaac Asimov by referencing the Three Laws of Robotics]
That old magic was Astarte's - Humbert Wolfe "Wheels 1919"
Grey doves of Astarte - Francis Brett Young "Doves"
In Astor's mansion, where the rich resort - T.W.P. "Letter Second: To Thomas Carlyle, Esquire, London" [The Knickerbocker v.22, no.1, July 1843]
Who is the smith or athena of this? - Brian Blanchfield "Learning"
Wide-eyed as Athena's wired owl - Diane Raptosh "American Amnesiac [Is it possible to let the sleeping life seep into day--]
No Juno eclipsing your Athena - Dean Young "Son of Fog" [Poetry April 2005]
Atlas.
Die before the shears of Atropos - Julia Kavanagh "Sonnet"
Augustine with his feet of snow - James Elroy Flecker "The Dying Patriot"
More saints for Augustine's mother - Brenda Hillman "Sediments of Santa Monica"
The spiritual steel of Saint Augustine - Alfred Noyes "Darwin V: The Vera Causa"
Aurelian led in his triumphant train - Myron L. Mason "Zenobia" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIII no.4, Oct. 1848]
Aurelian's soldiers swept the thirsty sands - Myron L. Mason "Zenobia" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIII no.4, Oct. 1848]
Like Asrael's venomed dart - Benjamin West Ball "Anastasius"
Azrael's eyes upon her, Raphael's wings above - Rudyard Kipling "Jane's Marriage"
The shadow of Azrael, angel of terror - Annie Porter "Selim" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.20, Dec. 1877]
Where Azrael reaps a full harvest - Barry Straton "Charity"
On a mission to the Aztecs - Captain Owen Rutter "The Song of Tiadatha"
Start crying down the wrath of Baal - Nelson S. Bond "The Ballad of Blaster Bill" [Planet Stories summer 1941 issue]
Snap-frozen in the blizzards called down by Baba Yaga - Jenny Blackford "Eleven Exhibits in a Better Natural History Museum, London"
Stolen by Baba Yaga's wicked swan-geese - Julia Kolchinsky "Naming"
Huddled by the space heater in Baba Yaga's hut - Lincoln Michel "Another Tuesday Afternoon"
Bacchus/Bacchanal.
The heavy task of learning what Bach knew - Constance Fenimore Woolson "Commonplace" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.11, no.23, Feb. 1873]
Triumph erewhile of Bacon's fabled arts - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
A fragment of the spectrum of Bahamut's shining scales - Tim Pratt "A Bestiary: Poor Bahamut"
As clearly as the ass explained to Balaam - "The Times" [The Knickerbocker v.10, no.4, October 1837]
Balder's funeral flames are blazing forth - Edmund Clarence Stedman "The Sleigh-Ride"
Bids everyone to weep for Baldur - Jo Walton "The Godzilla Sonnets: iii) Godzilla Weeps for Baldur"
As Bruce's followers shed the Baliol's blood - Delta "Lines Written in the Isle of Bute" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXVIII, v.LIV, Dec. 1843]
Each particle a Basho frog slipping into the pond - Richard Chwedyk "Rich and Pam Go to Fermilab and Later See a Dead Man"
As sharp and as multilayered as Basho's haiku - Keith Taylor "What's Needed Now"
Some architectural details about Batman's cape - Dean Young "Sean Penn Anti-Ode" [Poetry July 2006]
Where Dante dwells with Beatrice - Sophie Jewett "The Translator to the Author" (preface to Jewett's translation of "The Pearl"
Beelzebub flaps his frozen wings - Erika L. Sanchez "The Loop"
Silenced Beethoven with one paw - Rodney Jones "For Katy"
Hurtled in a Beethoven surge - Rodger Kamenetz "The Living Hive"
Deaf Beethoven's phantasy of tone - Emma Lazarus "City Visions"
And cuckoo mingle with the thoughts of Bel - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
All spent at Belial's shrine - Benjamin West Ball "The Penitent"
Belshazzar raised his eyes and saw - Frances E. Watkins Harper "The Jewish Grandfather's Story"
a cast net blessed by saint benedict - Amanda Gafford "Tigerlily"
Benjamin Franklin's Ghost House - Nicole Connolly "Dream Job"
Where Ben Franklin was baptized - January Gill O'Neil "Old South Meeting House"
Covering Beowulf's greatest hits on your tin kazoo - Catherynne M. Valente "What the Dragon Said: A Love Story"
A nova's flare from out the coils of Berenice's hair - Harry Martinson "Aniara 55" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
Blake knew how deep is Hell, and Heaven how high - William Rose Benét "Mad Blake"
Blake heard the asides of God - William Rose Benét "Mad Blake" [William Blake]
That was sung to the soul of the madman, Blake - William Rose Benét "Mad Blake"
Blake's angel parting willow leaves - Stephen Kuusisto "Only Bread, Only Light"
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me in the Seven Sacred Trances - T.S. Eliot "A Cooking Egg"
The roof of Blue-Beard's palace - Vachel Lindsay "When the Mississippi Flowed in Indiana"
To Ruth the eyes of Boaz shone clear light - Victor Hugo "Boaz Asleep" transl. not credited
Worth a score of dead Boccaccios - James Russell Lowell "Fitz Adam's Story"
Even when the Bolsheviks took his home - Mike Allen "Kandinsky's Garden"
I knew no harm of Bonaparte - G.K. Chesterton "The Rolling English Road"
Who broke the sin that Bonaparte planned - T.M. Kettle "Paddy (After Mr. Kipling)"
Toward the greenroom of John Wilkes Booth - Paul Gregory Nauert "Leaping Through the Centuries"
Boreal/Boreas.
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride - T.S. Eliot "A Cooking Egg"
Borgia fair the poppy is - Scharmel Iris "Fantasy of Dusk and Dawn"
Brims not with Borgia's wine - Muriel Stuart "The New Aspasia"
Drink gin o'er the tombstone of Brian Boru - "The Proclamation" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
Forever fixed on Brahma's airy throne - Benjamin West Ball "Elfin Land"
Drink gin o'er the tombstone of Brian Boru - "The Proclamation" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
The battle that John Brown begun - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
John Brown was a hero undaunted, true and brave - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
To join the ironies with Old John Brown - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
As Bruce's followers shed the Baliol's blood - Delta "Lines Written in the Isle of Bute" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXVIII, v.LIV, Dec. 1843]
Demons shriek'd as Brutus dealt the blow - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
Have we not our Brutuses - Taras Shevchenko "To the Dead" transl. by Alexander Jardine Hunter
Have come home laughing from the feast for Robert Burns - Mark Jarman "My Parents Have Come Home Laughing"
One flash of Byron's lightning - William Watson "On Exaggerated Deference to Foreign Literary Opinion"
No Byron for your Shelley - Dean Young "Son of Fog" [Poetry April 2005]
Caesar.
Cain.
Caligula and Nero knew a godliness akin to mine - Thomas M. Disch "Ballade of the New God"
The gaunt sons of Calvin's iron breed - James Russell Lowell "Agassiz"
The scent of nameless Calypsos - Ann K. Schwader "Of Ithaca & Ice"
Down all the stretch of Carpetbaggers - Alexander Posey "The Fall of the Redskin"
A gin-fountain smashed by Carrie Nation - Wallace Irwin "An Inside Con to Refined Guys"
Summer nights of lightning bugs and Johnny Cash - Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake "Someday I'll Love--"
Each town has its Cassandra - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Willingly accept Cassandra's Fate - Anne Killigrew "Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another"
So they cry out from stones as did Cassandra - Harry Martinson "Aniara 26" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
The eyes of anguish-stricken Cassiopeia - Edward Dowden "Andromeda"
A humble cloud can bust the lamp of Cassiopeta [sic] - John Grey "Skywatching"
From which Castor and Pollux hatched - Marianne Moore "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'"
Cato, true to parchment laws, protests with rigid hands - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Celine who pinned the moon to a page - Michael Waters "Homo Sapiens" [Poetry, January 1988]
Her Cerberus grew far more heads than most - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
With Cerberus to guard its portals - Edward Burrough Brownlow "Orpheus"
Remorse, more dread than Cerberus' growl - Madeleine Sweeny Miller "Sonnet to Nemesis, Goddess of Remorse"
Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born - John Milton "L'Allegro"
Ceres.
Charon.
Charybdis which in ruts appears - "The Nine Holes of the Links of St. Andrews: II. The Second or Cartgate Hole"
So shall Charybdis wear a grace - Arthur Quiller-Couch "The Splendid Spur"
If Charybdis seize our keel - Edmund Clarence Stedman "Penelope"
To stammer where old Chaucer used to sing - John Keats "Endymion, Book I [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]"
Ere Cheops had builded his pyramid - Charles Mair "The Voice of the Pines"
Chicken little in a broken shell - Paul Bernstein "Day One of the Deluge"
Chiron in broken bathroom light - Beasa A. Dukes "After Watching 'Moonlight'"
We supped instead each night on Chopin - Rita Dove "Transit"
Finding sense under mad Chopin's mask - Constance Fenimore Woolson "Commonplace" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.11, no.23, Feb. 1873]
That Kronos' dreaded scythe was shivered - Friedrich Schiller "Reproach-To Laura"
The cracked tune that Chronos sings - William Butler Yeats "The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
If Chronos comes to Hecate's door - Cynthia Zarin "Orbit"
State praises flow from lofty-sounding Cicero - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Cimmerian depths of mystery and sin - Iris Tree "Streets"
And Caesar into Cincinnatus grew - Delta "Stanzas Written After the Funeral of Admiral Sir David Milne, G.C.B." [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLVI, v.LVII, June 1845]
Far from Cinderella's dainty glass slippers - Cynthia Manick "A Taste of Blue"
Whom first Cincinnatus did doom - Mrs. A. Ritson "Classical Enigmas"
Circe.
When the haughty Cleopatra sailed to meet her Roman Mars - Laurens Maynard "Ave Post Saecula"
The serpent's tooth saved Cleopatra - Lola Ridge "The Woman with Jewels"
In Cleopatra's stormy bacchanal - Francis Brett Young "To Lydia Lopokova: Her Variety"
In meads where blue Clitumnus shines - Rev. James Gilborne Lyons "A Welcome Sacrifice" [Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, no.428, 13 March 1852]
I'll take whatever prize sage Clotho gives - Friedrich Schiller "To the Fates"
Cole Porter never wrote a song about us - Ishmael Reed "Skin Tight"
Consult Coleridge on the Imagination - Stanley Moss "Winter Flowers"
The faith thrice broken that incurred Columbia's vengeful sword - M.E. Thropp "The City of Mexico. Written While the War Was Pending" [Graham's Magazine v.XXII no.12, Dec. 1848]
To see and understand Pierrot and Columbine - Arthur Davison Ficke "A Watteau Melody"
Columbus's doom-burdened caravels - J.C. Squire "Sonnet [There was an Indian]"
The silence of lost Cosmonauts - Daisy Aldan "The Sky Is Moving Farther Back, Opaque"
Coyote.
More treasure than Croesus ever saw - Clarence Butler "We Two" [The Continental Monthly v.4 no.5, Nov. 1863]
Makes him richer than Croesus in gold - Rudolph Valentino "Cap and Bells (To F.)"
The people Cromwell taught - Roger Casement "Oliver Cromwell 1650-1659"
Centuries dark with Cromwell's name - James T. Fields "On a Portrait of Cromwell"
Not slain by Cromwell's sword - T.M. Kettle "Ulster (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling)"
With mighty Cromwell and tall King Saul - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
Cupid.
Mother of Stone, Cybele - Stephen Yenser "Petition on Santorini"
They raze Cygnus with worries for the next day - John Grey "Skywatching"
And Dedalus left for the sky - Etel Adnan "Night"
daedalus fly your wings - Elizabeth Bartlett "ekstasis"
Waxen wings by Daedalus designed - James Beattie "Epistle to the Honourable C. B."
Did he blame Daedalus, his father? - Wendy A. Shaffer "Icarus"
Every heart sets up its separate Dagon - G.H.H. "Night and Morning" (from The Knickerbocker, v. 23:3, March 1844)
Deflected Dali's softening emissions - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
Can't escape from Dali's dream - Richard Solomon "Dream Caused by the Fight of the Bumblebee"
Oh Danaë to this spring of cosmic gold - D.H. Lawrence "Tommies in the Train"
Rich as the shower of Danaë - H. Perceval "Callirhoe"
You're not the only lion after Daniel - Wallace Irwin "An Inside Con to Refined Guys"
Dante [allusion].
Dainty as Daphne's divinest - Howard Futhey Brinton "The Spring Violet"
Resound with echoes of Daphne's name - Henry S. Leigh "The Two Ages"
having flung d'artagnan clear to luna's tepid stone - Andy Miller "All Those Bleached Bones"
Thrust into the Darwinian claw - Mary Jo Bang "E Is Everywhere"
Darwin dreams of orchids - Mary Jo Bang "The Expression of Emotions"
Give us Darwin's eyes - Vachel Lindsay "The Scientific Aspiration"
May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin - James Russell Lowell "Credidimus Jovem Regnare"
David [Allusion, biblical].
The afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora - D.H. Lawrence "Dreams Old and Nascent" [David Copperfield and Dora Spenlow]
Beyond the Skill of Doctor Dee - "Mundus Foppensis" [PG lists 'Dubious author: John Evelyn"]
As Demeter mourned through many-fountained Enna - Arthur Stringer "Hephaestus"
Envied not Demosthenes his Greek - Aldous Huxley "Formal Verses II"
How Demosthenes walk'd on the beach - Henry S. Leigh "The Gift of the Gab"
The last echoes of Diana's horn - George Meredith "Appreciation"
Child thieves out of a Dickens novel - Theodora Goss "Goldilocks and the Bear"
When Emily's deathly fly calls to her - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Emily Dickinson]
Dickinson retreating yet getting brighter - Dean Young "Winged Purposes" [Poetry Feb. 2009] [probably the asteroid named for Terence Dickinson]
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Dionysus.
The purple flowers of Dis burn their young foreheads - Humbert Wolfe "THE WOODCUTTERS OF HÜTTELDORF"
Diadems drop and Doges surrender - Emily Dickinson "Book 1: Time and Eternity IV"
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Profiles forsworn to Donatello - Mina Loy "The Black Virginity"
The afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora - D.H. Lawrence "Dreams Old and Nascent" [David Copperfield and Dora Spenlow]
Sidestepped Duchamp's fractured descent - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
The melancholy strain of Echo - William Anderson "Landscape Lyrics No.XII--Twilight"
Echo hath taken the song - Clark Ashton Smith "Requiescat"
Blood supplemented with Edison and Tesla's currents - Kyle Dargan "Dear Echo" [Poetry Feb. 2016]
Each step of Edward's conquering host - Felicia Hemans "Wallace's Invocation to Bruce"
Einstein permitting himself multitudes - CM Burroughs "God Letter"
Misaligned marbles worthy of Elgin - Mary Jo Bang "A Tour of the March Equinox"
Elisha's Bears may even now be on the Stairs - Lady Helena Carnegie and Mrs Arthur Jacob "Heartless Folly"
When Emily's deathly fly calls to her - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Emily Dickinson]
To hang over Endymion's sleep - Matthew Arnold "Isolation: To Marguerite"
So shall Endymion faithful prove - Ronsard "To the Moon" transl. by Andrew Lang
That Endymion sighed to yield his spirit - H.T. Tuckerman "Luna.--An Ode" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIV no.5, May 1849]
The letters which Endymion wrote - Oscar Wilde "On the Sale by Auction of Keats' Love Letters"
Who got to Paradise, like Enoch, without dying - Stanley Moss "Winter Flowers"
Eros.
Back to English gardens after Euclid's linear - Anne Spencer "Life-Long, Poor Browning..." [Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, ed. by Countee Cullen, 1927]
her clothes hamper full of Euclidean geometry - upfromsumdirt (Ron Davis) "Ogechi Hula-Hoops The Rings Of Saturns"
Seek relief from the Eumenides of woe - Charlotte Bronte "Frances"
Dear to the Eumenides, and to all the heavenly brood - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Fate"
Sweeter than Euphrosyne's tongue - Robert Nichols "A Faun's Holiday"
In Euripides' great wake they are swept up - Patricia Goedicke "The Reading Club"
Eurydice [allusion].
Eve [Biblical allusion].
The unrivall'd Falstaff of the ground - "The First Hole at St. Andrews on a Crowded Day"
Like Falstaff, seeks repose and dreams of glory - J. Fairfax McLaughlin writing as Pasquino "The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons"
Father Time oils his clocks - Dom "Number Cruncher: Here's a Crowd"
They never fool Old Father Time - Rudolph Valentino "Cap and Bells (To F.)"
Which folded Faust in joy elysian - Benjamin West Ball "To D.S.H."
What the FBI already downloaded - Jameka Williams "Self-Care is a Psy-Op"
Wolf blood and Fenrir lines that chill the bone - Robert Frazier "The Mutant Forests of Mars"
Foucault lectures to the ghosts of crows - Mónica Alexandra Jiménez "Theft"
All the birds in grace sigh at Saint Francis - Paul Cameron Brown "Casha"
Scorner of Midas and St. Francis - Arthur Davison Ficke "To John Cowper Powys, on His 'Confessions'"
Like good Saint Francis scatters crumbs of Hope - Oliver Herford "William Dean Howells"
What St. Francis called a mystery - Ira Sadoff "The Soul"
A Dr. Frankenstein in the lab with herself - Elizabeth Knapp "Self-Portrait as Cindy Sherman's Instagram Account"
Shelving Freud with Marx - Ruth Lechlitner "Lines for the Year's End"
How Frida had risen to see her double world - Yusef Komunyakaa "Frida's Earth Mother" [Frida Kahlo]
When Robert's snowy woods glow with an unearthly light - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Robert Frost]
Reading Frost on the subway - Sarah Getty "That Woman"
Fury/Furies.
The canvas on loan from Gabriel - Chris Dombrowski "See that my grave is swept clean"
And Gabriel's trumpet blow for you - Amy Lowell "Evelyn Ray"
Sings to me with the power of Gabriel's trumpet - Keith Taylor "What's Needed Now"
And Sir Galahad lies hid - Robert Graves "Babylon"
a Galatea in Python too cold to share a bed with - Caroline Mao "When My Father Reprograms My Mother {"
Whisper in the ears of Galileo - Linda Pastan "Time Travel"
In the fearful time of Gallia's madness - C. "The Young Grey Head" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXVIII, v.LIII, Feb. 1843]
When Ganesh marries my mother - Mike Allen "The Journey to Kailash"
Ganymede fleeing on a temple frieze - Dan Chiasson "Tackle Football"
Nature's self thy Ganymede - Abraham Cowley "The Grasshopper"
Who bore St George's standards o'er the deep - Delta "Stanzas Written After the Funeral of Admiral Sir David Milne, G.C.B." [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLVI, v.LVII, June 1845]
singing Gershwin in the backyard - Sarah Kay "In the House With No Doors"
The band of Gideon roam the sky - Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. "The Band of Gideon"
When Allen's rebel howl bares sharp canines - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Allen Ginsberg]
That won't be improved by adding Godzilla - Andre F. Peltier "Ishirou Honda to the Edge of Panic"
Gog and Magog to the fray - Arthur Cleveland Coxe "Onward"
the damage is always goldilocks style - Cislyn Smith "Borrower"
Had laid Goliaths in the dust - John Castillo "Old Sam! or the Effects of the Gospel"
Gorgon.
Goth/Gothic.
Transpose Jesus onto the Grateful Dead - Taylor Byas "Conversion: On Cincinnati's Converted Churches, God, and Lucifer"
Fear of waking up as Gregor Samsa - Xander Gershberg "Codename Beast: A Sestina"
In the dark recess where one weeps for Grendel - Shutta Crum "Always, there are mothers"
Stranger than anything Mr. Wells could have ever imagined - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [H.G. Wells]
Hades.
The ghost of Hamlet's father wandering through - Martin Espada "Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks"
No Hamlet hold my jaws and speak - Carl Sandburg "Bones"
Where Hammurabi made firm wings of law - Lou Barrett "Fertile Crescent"
Contemplate how to defeat our Hannibal - Tanque R. Jones "Scipio"
And Hannibal still hero of the Alps - Joaquin Miller "As It Is Written"
Harlequin.
Harmodius' sword bright flashing through the gloom - E. A. Warriner "Battle of the Wilderness" [The Continental Monthly v.6 no.2, August 1864]
When fair Hebe left the sky - Mrs. A. Ritson "Classical Enigmas"
Hecate.
Hector's sword is asleep from war - Stephen Vincent Benet "The First Vision of Helen"
Scattered by Hector's dogs - Amaud Jamaul Johnson "Tar Baby"
Nearer pace brave Hector, reckless Paris - Henrietta Cordelia Ray "The Venus of Milo"
Where Heisenberg's rules are reflexive - Richard Chwedyk "Rich and Pam Go to Fermilab and Later See a Dead Man"
Heat shimmer veils Heisenberg details - David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Mike Allen "Rattlebox"
Helen (allusion).
Which Hephaistos did build - W. Wilfred Campbell "Phaethon"
Join Hercules' cult to Mammon's - Ruben Dario "To Roosevelt" transl. unknown per poets.org
Protege of trickster Hermes - Mike Allen "Picasso's Rapture"
Hermes, god of cheats and chatter - "London Lyrics: The Auctioneer's Ode to Mercury" [The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction v.13, no.365, 11 April 1829]
Hermes' whisper in the flutes - Edwin Markham "Song of the Followers of Pan"
Hermes waits to lead me home - Jessie M.E. Saxby "Persephone: A Lay of Spring" [Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 5th series, no.114-v.III, 6 March 1886]
In the noise of Herod's silence - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Left nothing for the head of Holofernes - Mary Hickman "Everything Is Autobiography and Everything Is a Portrait"
Homer (allusion).
Houdini picks the locks of death - Kevin Goodan "Anaphora"
Houdini picking the locks of god - Kevin Goodan "Anaphora"
And Humpty Dumpty nobody can heal - Harry Martinson "Aniara 61" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg
Hyperion divides the pillared vault of dark - Clark Ashton Smith "The Return of Hyperion"
Better than Years with Ibsen spent - Wallace Irwin "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr."
Icarus [allusion].
That mock the painted bow of Iris - L.A. Wilmer "To Mira" [Southern Literary Messenger v.II no.1 Dec. 1835-6]
Snows come and all my Isaacs die - Julia Alvarez "Winter Storm"
Isaac invented you in isolation - Mary Alexandra Agner "Be True" [context indicates Isaac Asimov by referencing the Three Laws of Robotics]
I'm yelling at Isaac Luria's grave - Mónica Gomery "The End Is the Beginning"
Supreme beyond Isaiah's dream - Benjamin Copeland "The Goal"
Rapt Isaiah strikes the heavenly lyre - George Santayana "King's College Chapel"
Played Iscariot to your Pythias - Frank Horne "Letters Found Near a Suicide" [Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, ed. by Countee Cullen, 1927]
Mocks sad-eyed Ishtar and her mourning maids - William Talbot Allison "There Sat the Women Weeping for Thammuz"
Ishtar in the ship of life - Laura Kasischke "Champagne"
Isis deep in the seasons - Cal Bedient "Expulsion"
At the veiled Isis in its keep - James Russell Lowell "Credidimus Jovem Regnare"
Scarce rival Isis on her fairer tide - U.T. "The College.--A Sketch in Verse" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCIII, v.LXV, May 1849]
Across the blue of Isis' veil - Helen Hay Whitney "East and West"
Give me the death of Tristan and Isolde - Adolf Wolff "The Call of Sex"
While Israfel loud chanted from the Void - Wallace Irwin "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr."
And heard the horn of Ivanhoe - Sidney Royse Lysaght "First Horizons"
With a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel - John Keats "Hyperion"
Lest Jack Frost should their pumpkin harm - William E. Barton "The Story of a Pumpkin Pie"
When old Jack Frost would never get a single try - Sydney Dayre "A Letter to Mother Nature" [Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad (ed. by Daphne Dale), 1894]
Lost to the rebel knave, Jack Frost - Henry van Dyke "The Ruby-Crowned Kinglet"
The shoes Jack Giant-killer wore - James Beattie "Epistle to the Honourable C. B."
Sketch a Jackson Pollock splatter of concrete poetry - Regie Cabico "A Carpapalooza: An American Anthem"
Like the Dream-ladder Jacob slept by - Martha Walker Cook "Clouds: Rain Clouds. Respectfully Dedicated to Professor Guyot" [The Continental Monthly v.5 no.3, March 1864]
Shapes like those in Jacob's dream - James H. Cousins "The Railway Arch"
Climbs the ladder Jacob saw - Nancy Luce "No Comfort"
The traffic of Jacob's ladder - Francis Thompson "The Kingdom of God"
Looked Janus-faced to innocence and guilt - William Wetmore Story "A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem"
As Jason heard in violet seas - Louis Golding "Prophet and Fool"
Foolish Jason on a treacherous sea - Sidney Lanier "Corn" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.15, no.86, Feb. 1875]
With Jason ventured for the fated Golden Fleece - "The Modern Argonauts" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no. CCCXV, v.LXVII, May 1850]
The towers of Jason's sea-girt city - Bayard Taylor "Hylas"
From the matrix of Jefferson's imagination - Kiki Petrosino "The Maiden"
Jehovah of acorns, watchtower of the thunders - Stanley Kunitz "The Testing-Tree"
And Jeremiah mourns Jerusalem - George Santayana "King's College Chapel"
Transpose Jesus onto the Grateful Dead - Taylor Byas "Conversion: On Cincinnati's Converted Churches, God, and Lucifer"
Jesus leaned on the cornerstone - Brandon O'Brian "Population Changes"
Quiet Jews robed in earth and light - Mike Allen "Chagall's Lamp"
We do not think why hate Jezebel? - Anne Carson "Thunderstorm Stack"
The jezebels are coming for us - Andre F. Peltier "The Love Theme from Switchblade Sisters"
Dirt from Jim Morrison's grave for a voice - Denise Dumars "The Golem"
Levelled with the life of Job - King Charles I "A Royal Lamentation"
For the lost terrains of Xanadu or Johannes Kepler - Robert Frazier "A Feel for the Heavens"
The battle that John Brown begun - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
John Brown was a hero undaunted, true and brave - "The Kansas John Brown Song" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]
To join the ironies with Old John Brown - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
Since I've become John Doe - Diane Raptosh "American Amnesiac [The self is a thousand localities]"
Toward the greenroom of John Wilkes Booth - Paul Gregory Nauert "Leaping Through the Centuries"
Summer nights of lightning bugs and Johnny Cash - Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake "Someday I'll Love--"
Was such sensation Jonah's doom - Charlotte Bronte "Gilbert II: The Parlour"
When leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger - Adrienne Rich "Yom Kippur 1984"
Jonah wept within the whale - Leonora Speyer "To a Song of Sappho discovered in Egypt"
Like the gourd which Jonas had - Simon Wastell "Man's Mortality"
Joseph's fat cattle and atrophied kine - "Britain's Prosperity: A New Song, which Ought to Have Been Sung by the Premier at the Opening of Parliament" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXIV, v.LXVII, Apr. 1850]
Jove.
Yet Judith, till her war was won - Vachel Lindsay "A Rhyme for All Zionists: The Eyes of Queen Esther, and How they Conquered King Ahasuerus"
Insofar as Juliet is the sun - Carolina Ebeid "Punctum/Metaphor"
Follow where his Juliet calls - Richard Le Gallienne "Cor Cordium"
The blossoms from Juliet's breast - James Oppenheim "A Handful of Dust"
Juno.
Jupiter.
Kafka's number one fan - Chen Chen "Kafka's Axe & Michael's Vest"
Too late to ask Kafka what he thinks - Dean Young "I Am But a Traveller in this Land & Know Little of Its Ways"
For the lost terrains of Xanadu or Johannes Kepler - Robert Frazier "A Feel for the Heavens"
Khrushchev took a crystal submarine down - Catherynne M. Valente "Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985"
Old King Cotton's dead and buried - "Corn Is King" [The Continental Monthly v.2 no.2, March 1862]
Into Dante's Kinsey scaled inferno - Brody Parrish Craig "Us Let the Radio Play Along & I"
While Kipling's banjo strings blaspheme a sacred text - T.M. Kettle "Ulster (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling)"
Midas' gold or Krupp's iron wealth secured - Paul Cameron Brown "The Treasure Ships"
The Lady of the Lake presiding over the bridge - Anthony Butts "Eight Modes toward Desire"
Laertes at his sister's grave bids violets spring - H.T. Tuckerman "To the Violet" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIII no.4, Oct. 1848]
Where Lancelot and Tristram vigil keep - Maurice Baring "In Memoriam, A.H. (Auberon Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas, R.F.C.; killed November 3, 1916)"
And taught King Lear how to wear a crown of straw - Marin Sorescu "Shakespeare" transl. by Michael Hamburger
Sheltered Lear on the blasted heath - Jo Walton "The Godzilla Sonnets: ii) Godzilla in Shakespeare"
Whiter still than Leda's love - John Keats "Endymion, Book I [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]"
Will a new LEONARDO arise on our ken? - Bulwer Lytton publishing as Owen Meredith "Lucile: Part I Canto II"
Leonardo's paints on canvas live - Russell W. Davenport "Poems IX"
Can follow Leonardo's rapid brush - Russell W. Davenport "Poems IX"
Leviathan.
Where the lost Lilith went - Bliss Carman "Song"
And Lilith roses dipped in wine - Joyce Kilmer "Ballade of My Lady's Beauty"
With the heart of Lilith - Edna St Vincent Millay [untitled sonnet]
Who saw Lincoln stand up before the faces of a city - Witter Bynner "This Man"
Each a Lincoln in his smoldering patience - Helen Keller "The Song of the Stone Wall"
Lir's vast host of shouting water - "Tempest on the Sea" transl. by Robin Flower
Marks the reddened feet of the Followers of Lot - Nada Almosa "Queer Arab Dictionary"
Not unlike Lot's wife - Amaud Jamaul Johnson "No More Birminghams"
Lucifer.
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride - T.S. Eliot "A Cooking Egg"
Some elusive bog-buried Lucy - Mary Jo Bang "I Could Have Been Better"
All we have is the echo of Luke Skywalker - Deron Eckert "Luke Skywalker Could Do a Lot of Things"
Their might hearts swelling loved Luna to greet - "Asleep" [The Continental Monthly v.6 no.3, Sept. 1864]
Luna, with her star-gemmed, glorious crown - Rufus W. Griswold "The Sunset Storm" [Graham's Magazine v.XXI no.3, Sept. 1842]
having flung d'artagnan clear to luna's tepid stone - Andy Miller "All Those Bleached Bones"
I'm yelling at Isaac Luria's grave - Mónica Gomery "The End Is the Beginning"
Each a Luther in his fearless faith - Helen Keller "The Song of the Stone Wall"
A feather from Ma'at's radiant head - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
Recall to-day the glorious Maccabean rage - Emma Lazarus "The Banner of the Jew"
Where Macha's flame-tongued horses flee - Thomas Boyd "The King's Son"
Greed, like a gorged Machiavelli - Maxwell Bodenheim "American Vaudeville Show"
Our court schemes are too profound for Machiavel himself - John Gay "Fable LII: Vulture, Sparrow, and Birds" [edited, updated, & adapted by John Benson Rose]
Leader without Machiavellian teeth - Justin Rovillos Monson "Institutional(ized) Political Poem, or Poem for Disputed Territories"
A smile of Sarcophagi, Sun-gods, and Madonnas - Daisy Aldan "Everywhere in Constancy, He Is Intoning, Look! Look!"
Maenad.
And watched Magellan's white-winged ships - Sharlot M. Hall "The West"
Gog and Magog to the fray - Arthur Cleveland Coxe "Onward"
Mammon.
With Chairman Mao himself chasing us - Chen Chen "First Light"
The ghost of Marius walks to-night - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Where exiled Marius lurk'd in fear - J.S.B. "Caesar" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCLXXXII, v.LXII, Aug. 1847]
Marlowe hurled forth huge stars - Muriel Stuart "Words"
Mars.
Tune up the poems performed to Marsyas' flute - Bob Holman "Scotty and the Rib Tips"
The world was filled with talking Martís - Mara Pastor "Los Bustos de Martí/The Busts of Martí" transl. by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong
Shelving Freud with Marx - Ruth Lechlitner "Lines for the Year's End"
The eyes of Mary Magdalene - Jean Blewett "The Two Marys"
Lost whispers of the Magdalen - N. Scott Momaday "Spectre"
I do not want what Mary Shelley made - Mary Alexandra Agner "Book of the Dead Woman"
While pale Medea culled her deadly flowers - Maurice Baring "Le Prince Errant"
To undertake Medea's rescuing eyes - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Medea's soft and deadly name - Louise Imogen Guiney "The White Sail"
For Medea's wondrous alchemy - Percy Bysshe Shelley "Alastor: or, the Spirit of Solitude"
A Medici through to my soul - Jess Nevins "My Last Duke"
Medusa.
Making Melville eat his whale - Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Autobiography"
The beautiful geometry of Mendel's peas and their grim logic - Rita Dove "Family Reunion"
And lean Menelaus is smiling sleet - Stephen Vincent Benet "The Last Vision of Helen"
Mephisto never yet was caught beneath false colors - Oliver Herford "Mephisto"
Yet when Mephisto would foreclose - Oliver Herford "Mephisto"
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Mercury.
Breath of mystic times and Merlin sage - L. Rice-Oxley "The Opening of the Grave of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury"
If old Methuselah's years were mine - Charlotte F. Bates "Contrasted Moods" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.XVII, no.98, Feb. 1876]
Uriel and Michael were your sons - Vachel Lindsay "To Eve, Man's Dream of Wifehood as Described by Milton"
Covered by St. Michael's shield - Polonski "On Skobelef" transl. by John Pollen
Michelangelo's dark daughter Night - Charles Baudelaire "The Ideal" transl. not credited
Michelangelo enameled in cerulean - Dan Chiasson "Bloom (II)"
Who pulled my braids and boasted about meeting Mickey Mouse - Leonora Simonovis "Little Bruja"
Midas [allusion].
Milton [allusion].
Minerva.
Dodged Miro's famished halo of animalcules - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"
Having come from Mithraic light - Stephen Kuusisto "Dark Joys 18"
Mithridates, he died old - A.E. Housman "A Shropshire Lad LXII"
The luring laugh of Moira - Clinton Scollard "The Wonders"
Moloch.
The bombs, the explosives, and Molotovs are overhead - Regie Cabico "Morning After the Election"
The breeze watches it all with her Mona Lisa smile - Norla Chee "Navajo Mountain"
Monet grew his gardens - Atticus "Love Her Wild"
Where the Mongol steeds never galloped - Rachel Rodman "The Past Is a Foreign Country"
Dirt from Jim Morrison's grave for a voice - Denise Dumars "The Golem"
Moses.
Mozart.
Muse.
Naiad.
The mute Napoleon of the brain - Alexander Anderson "A Blackbird's Nest" [Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 5th series, no.28-v.I, 12 July 1884]
Revisions to the Napoleon machine - Mary Jo Bang "For the Final Report"
The northern streamers paled Napoleon's lurid star - "The Fireman's Song" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
Above the pillar of Napoleon's pride - Alexander Pushkin "A Monument" transl. by John Pollen
Narcissus.
A gin-fountain smashed by Carrie Nation - Wallace Irwin "An Inside Con to Refined Guys"
Be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar - Eric Gamalinda "Factory of Souls"
The sacred way to Nebuchadnezzar's throne - William Carlos Williams "March"
The Nefertiti fake chipped on the run - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
That fought that day with Nelson at the Nile - "The Fireman's Song" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIX, v.LV, Jan. 1844]
Dead Nelson and his half-dead crew - Thomas Hardy "Trafalgar"
Two guitars fighting over the same late career Willie Nelson - Sophie Fink "The Dogs Don't Forgive Us"
Nemesis without a zipper for escape - Erin Belieu "She Returns to the Water"
Nemesis is knocking at the door - Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]"
Neptune.
Nereids who dwell in wet caves - H.D. "Acon"
Where Nereid maids about the sea-god throng - Rennell Rodd "At Lanuvium"
The luring airs of Nereid or Siren - Edmund Clarence Stedman "Penelope"
The Nereid of a moment - Arthur Symons "Stella Maris"
Nero [allusion].
Poets from the old days of Netzahualcoyotl - Ruben Dario "To Roosevelt" transl. unknown per poets.org
And hang fresh wreaths round Newton's awful brow - Anna Laetitia Barbauld "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"
All Newton's laws don't apply to us the same - Joshua Bennet "Owed to the Plastic on Your Grandmother's Couch"
Leap beyond the mind of Newton - Alfred Noyes "Darwin I: Chance and Design"
Repeat Nietzsche's recurring passion - Etel Adnan "Night"
Nietzsche between drying coats - Julia Alvarez "Manholes"
Between calculus and Nietzsche - Sue Budin "Looking for My Brother's Grave"
Why Nietzsche sought his soul's sympathy - Philip Schultz "Googling Ourselves"
Who once had wept like Niobe - Walter Richard Cassels "Spring"
The Niobe of nations - Arthur M. Forrester "The Tide Is Turning"
The fate of the Olympus-stricken Niobe - "The Misanthrope"
Noah.
The cold Norns who pattern life and rest - Bliss Carman "The White Gull"
Here shine the valiant Nunio's deeds unfeign'd - Luís de Camões "The Lusiad; or, The Discovery of India: Book I. Argument" transl. by William Julius Mickle
That haunt King Oberon's domains - Benjamin West Ball "Elfin Land"
Rul'd by Imperial Oberon's hand - Catherine Ann Turner Dorset "Think Before You Speak; Or, The Three Wishes"
Odin.
Sharks should pass Odysseus by - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers "Blues: Odysseus"
The thing that motivated Odysseus - Keith Taylor "The Sickness That Comes from the Longing for Home"
Think of the remorse of Oedipus - Frank Bidart "California Plush"
Old Nick upon his fingers tended - John Gay "Fable XLII: Juggler and Vice" [edited, updated, & adapted by John Benson Rose]
Round a plantation of Old Nick's - Charles G. Leland "The Last Ditch" [The Continental Monthly v.2 no.2, March 1862]
Like the drowned Ophelia fair - Benjamin West Ball "L'Envoi"
Ophelia in her small lake - Mary Jo Bang "Z Is for Zed at the End"
A kiss can resuscitate the drowned Ophelia - Joseph O. Legaspi "The Kisser's Handbook"
For Oppenheimer's optimal blossom - Ann K. Schwader "In the Burned Places"
Airy shapes of Oreads circling free - Eleanor Farjeon "Pan-Worship"
Hear the Oread's laughter pealing - Robert Nichols "A Faun's Holiday"
With Orestes through the mart - Louis Golding "Down Tottenham Court Road"
Orion.
Orpheus.
Osiris.
Where Ozymandius the strong lies in colossal ruin - J.B. Tabb "Shelley" [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, v.26, July 1880]
Or Pallas wake her sounding lyre - "Superior Nonsense Verses"
Wretched Palomides whom dreams torment - Stephen Vincent Benet "Two at the Crossroads"
Pan (Deity).
laughing as he changed the lyrics about Pancho Villa - ire'ne lara silva "me llamo viento"
Pandora [allusion].
The shadow stitchery of Paracelsus and Prometheus' fire - Sonya Taaffe "The Chymical Marriage"
The sharp and thirsty blood of Paris - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Nearer pace brave Hector, reckless Paris - Henrietta Cordelia Ray "The Venus of Milo"
While the coat cut for Peter is pass'd on to Paul - Bulwer Lytton publishing as Owen Meredith "Lucile: Part I Canto II"
To the waverer be an emblem of St Paul's content - Delta "A Wild-Flower Garland: The Daisy" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine no.CCCXX, v.LXVIII, Oct. 1850]
And down the wings of Pegasus would fold - Tomas de Iriarte "Epistle to Don Domingo de Iriarte, on His Travelling to Various Foreign Courts" [Modern Poets and Poetry of Spain 1860 ed. and transl. by James Kennedy]
Houses Pegasus and Equules in its dusty windows - John Grey "Skywatching"
Preferring Pegasus to any cart - Gustav Melby "The Lost Chimes"
A troth as just as had Penelope - Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey "The Excellency of His Love"
Penelope, who usurps and dishonors nothing - Philip Schultz "Luxury: One"
Persephone/Proserpine.
The careless grace my Perseus wears - Edward Dowden "Andromeda"
In the name of Peter's luck - Maikof (Apollon Maykov) "Who Was He? A Story of Peter the Great" transl. by John Pollen
While the coat cut for Peter is pass'd on to Paul - Bulwer Lytton publishing as Owen Meredith "Lucile: Part I Canto II"
As Peter's chains dropped for the Angel - Edith Wharton "The First Year [All Souls' Day]"
Imprisoned in one of Petrarch's sonnets - Pablo Neruda "The Book of Questions: X" transl. by William O'Daly
The pale unsistered Phaedra - Louise Imogen Guiney "The White Sail"
Pharaoh.
A fig for the Philistine slander - William Hodgson Ellis "The Lyric League"
And Phillis Wheatley prayed - January Gill O'Neil "Old South Meeting House"
Phoebus.
Nor turn your lips away from Phryne's silver limbs - Muriel Stuart "The New Aspasia"
A batch of Picasso's passion flowers - Lou Barrett "Time's Fool"
Picasso dipped his brush in their tears - Diane DeCillis "Weeping Women"
To see and understand Pierrot and Columbine - Arthur Davison Ficke "A Watteau Melody"
The white Pierrot, wreathed in smoke - Amy Lowell "Stravinsky's Three Pieces, 'Grotesques,' for String Quartets: Second Movement"
Foretold a dreadful doom for Pilate - Charlotte Bronte "Pilate's Wife's Dream"
A beggar Pilate rates thee - Michael Field "Blessed Are the Beggars Matt. v. 3"
Aquamarine Pisces gems for eyes - Denise Dumars "The Golem"
Half breed son of Pisces and Aquarius - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
And drove the proud Plantagenet before him - Robert Chambers "To Scotland" [Spirit of Chambers' Journal, 1834, Project Gutenberg]
The regal wine of Tudors or Plantagenets - Henry S. Leigh "To a Timid Leech"
Plato
Pleiades.
Pluto/Plutonian.
Sketch a Jackson Pollock splatter of concrete poetry - Regie Cabico "A Carpapalooza: An American Anthem"
From which Castor and Pollux hatched - Marianne Moore "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'"
Cole Porter never wrote a song about us - Ishmael Reed "Skin Tight"
Poseidon's burnished axle drifts - Benjamin West Ball "The Penitent"
Poseidon's voice sounds in the storm - Lewis Morris "The Epic of Hades book I: Tartarus: Phaedra"
Enough wealth to dazzle a Prester John - Paul Cameron Brown "The Treasure Ships"
The purple country of Prester John - G.K. Chesterton "The Ballad of the White Horse: Book VIII. The Scouring of the Horse"
A tale of Prester John - Vachel Lindsay "The Golden Whales of California"
For this Priam's great city of Troy was sacrificed - Humbert Wolfe "Columbine"
Prometheus.
The necromancy of a Prospero holds in thrall - Don Marquis "A Golden Lad (D.V.M.)"
Prospero warned me against walking alone - Kiki Petrosino "The Wish"
Their barks are host to a protean foxfire - Bruce Boston & Robert Frazier "A Compass for the Mutant Rain Forest"
Which penned in Proteus' wizard circle sleep - T. Sturge Moore "Sent from Egypt with a Fair Robe of Tissue to a Sicilian Vine-Dresser 276 B.C."
The Protean shapes of evil - John Presland "To the Leaders of Both Parties January 1910"
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea - William Wordsworth "The World Is Too Much With Us"
Reading Proust backwards - Tan Lin "RPT MC-60 00.27 8"
Psyche.
A tiny lay Puck hath late unfolden - B.C. "Love Lights" [Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 5th series, no.10-v.I, 8 March 1884]
The winter of Puritan snows - George Santayana "Fair Harvard"
In Pushkin's clock-haunted house - Sir Geoffrey Hill "Genius Loci"
Even Puss in Boots will wish that he were in your shoes - G.K. Chesterton "To Enid who acted the Cat in private Pantomime"
Passeth Pygmalion's artifice - "The Pearl" transl. by Sophie Jewett
Which Pygmalion made and loved - Clark Ashton Smith "The Masque of Forsaken Gods"
Framed on Pythagorean plan - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
Played Iscariot to your Pythias - Frank Horne "Letters Found Near a Suicide" [Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, ed. by Countee Cullen, 1927]
When Quijote roared his challenge to giants - Martin Espada "Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks"
Whipping Quijote's sword overhead - Martin Espada "Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks"
Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes - Oliver Herford "George Bernard Shaw"
The apotheosis of Ra's rivals - James Hannaham "Apophasis Now"
A cowboy in the boat of Ra - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
The voice of Rachel mourning - Emma Lazarus "By the Waters of Babylon"
Azrael's eyes upon her, Raphael's wings above - Rudyard Kipling "Jane's Marriage"
One of Raphael's angels held within this hush - David St. John "In the High Country"
Illumination in the manner of Rembrandt - John Moncure Wettarau "Too Big"
Where Reynard's paw could not molest - Palmer Cox "The Brownies' Kites"
Had not sly Reynard's wits to lay a plot - John Gay "Fable IV: Jove's Eagle, and Murmuring Beasts" [edited, updated, & adapted by John Benson Rose]
Have come home laughing from the feast for Robert Burns - Mark Jarman "My Parents Have Come Home Laughing"
When Robert's snowy woods glow with an unearthly light - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Robert Frost]
Not Rockefeller's treasure chest - William Hodgson Ellis "Horace, Odes I. i."
Roland's horn resounds through ages - Mark Jarman "Song of Roland"
Roland's song comes down from the Pyrenees - Mark Jarman "Song of Roland"
Who blew Roland's vain blast - James Russell Lowell "The Cathedral"
Roland's ghost winding a silent horn - Edwin Arlington Robinson "Mr. Flood's Party"
Romeo's passion rose to fire from one thin spark - Thom Gunn "During an Absence"
Your heart holds many a Romeo - Arthur Symons "Stella Maris"
Rommel was kissing heaven's dainty hands - Tomaž Šalamun "We Build a Barn and Read Reader's Digest"
No tango in its Rorschach - Jaswinder Bolina "Portrait of the Self"
Knotted as rose of Sharon - Michael Field "Relics"
And loves like Ruth's of old no end - Ralph Hodgson "The Song of Honour"
To Ruth the eyes of Boaz shone clear light - Victor Hugo "Boaz Asleep" transl. not credited
Through the sad heart of Ruth - John Keats "Ode to a Nightingale"
Can spin Sagittarius into spider - John Grey "Skywatching"
Sagittarius has an arrow drawn at the very heart of Scorpio - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
By what law did Sagittarius make his squatter's claim - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
For saints, look under the saint's name. For example, Saint Francis would be under Francis.
Delirious feet of the Princess Salome - E.E Cummings "Puella Mea"
Salome's dance is ended - Louis J. McQuilland "Ballade of Dead Favourites"
Fear of waking up as Gregor Samsa - Xander Gershberg "Codename Beast: A Sestina"
A Sampson of Titanic force - James H. Cousins "Copernicus"
Weighed us down as Samson in the temple - Fenton Johnson "The New Day"
Sensible as Sancho Panza - Clive Bell "The Legend of Monte della Sibilla"
Sappho [allusion].
Satan.
Saturn.
With mighty Cromwell and tall King Saul - Vachel Lindsay "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
Let David play the harp for Saul - Adrienne Rich "David's Boyhood"
A head that lies where Saul's has lain - Adrienne Rich "David's Boyhood"
Of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul - Ruben Dario "To Roosevelt" transl. unknown per poets.org
Waking under the fingernails of Scheherazade - Nathan Spoon "The Genie Speaks"
Sagittarius has an arrow drawn at the very heart of Scorpio - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
As Scorpio rises, Orion goes down - Robert Wrigley "Centaur over Tomer Butte"
A Scylla in the form of rushes - "The Nine Holes of the Links of St. Andrews: II. The Second or Cartgate Hole"
Where Scythians roam beneath the pole - J.S.B. "Marathon" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCLXIII, v.LXXV, May 1854]
Blaze with the fire of Semele - C.H.B. Kitchin "Opening Scene from 'Amphitryon'"
Going into town after Set - Ishmael Reed "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"
Shahjahan's drunk elephants are marching - Salik Shah "Field Notes"
Shakespeare (Allusion).
Knotted as rose of Sharon - Michael Field "Relics"
But not like Sheba's queen - Frances Ridley Havergal "Coming to the King"
Became sharp flame to Shelley listening - Joseph Auslander "Is This the Lark!" [Unclear whether Percy is meant or Mary]
I do not want what Mary Shelley made - Mary Alexandra Agner "Book of the Dead Woman"
No Byron for your Shelley - Dean Young "Son of Fog" [Poetry April 2005] [presumably Percy Bysshe Shelley]
The object of Shiva's daily regimen - Surdas "Sur's Ocean 47: The Pangs and Politics of Love" transl. by John Stratton Hawley
Sibyl (allusion).
Where yet Silenus grasps the woodland cup - "A Farewell to Naples" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCXIII, v.LXVII, March 1850]
Till even flushed Silenus wakes - Robert Nichols "A Faun's Holiday"
Sinatra always plays on payday - Angela Liu "Dow Jones Dream"
Between silence and Sinatra - Bruce Smith "Garden"
That Sinbad once sailed to Gaza - Ammiel Alcalay "My Apologies"
To where Sirius barks behind huge Orion - Walter de la Mare "The Ride-by-Nights"
Sisyphus.
All we have is the echo of Luke Skywalker - Deron Eckert "Luke Skywalker Could Do a Lot of Things"
Socrates [allusion].
Solomon.
A Solon ponders till his Years are great - Wallace Irwin "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr."
Before a Solon had devised the laws - Friedrich Schiller "The Artists" transl. not credited
Whom Sophocles controls - Lionel Johnson "The Classics"
Red flag waving over Spartacus - Lola Ridge "Red Flag"
Only a bare mirror at night for the Spinning Boy - Tu Fu "I Will Be Alone" transl. not credited [The Jade Flute, c.1960, Project Gutenberg]
Had missed the news bulletin about Stalin - Edward Hirsch "My First Bookstore"
Shall not Strabo then respect command - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
To play the role of Tantalus - Harold Acton "The Prodigal Son"
tantalus drink your fill - Elizabeth Bartlett "ekstasis"
The reason tortured Tantalus is baited - Countee Cullen "Yet Do I Marvel"
Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus - Iris Tree "[How often, when the thought of suicide]"
In Tears for her Telemachus - Anne Killigrew "To my Lady Berkeley, Afflicted upon her Son, My Lord Berkeley's Early Engaging in the Sea-Service"
And with the stars outdance Terpsichore - Geoffrey Dearmer "Eight Sonnets VII"
Terpsichore ruled with unlimited sway - L.V.F. Randolph "Mrs. Rabothem's Party" [The Continental Monthly v.4 no.1, July 1863]
Blood supplemented with Edison and Tesla's currents - Kyle Dargan "Dear Echo" [Poetry Feb. 2016]
Replicant echoes in red earth and Tesla coils - Sonya Taaffe "The Chymical Marriage"
With Theseus' sons at danger's gates - J.S.B. "Marathon" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCCLXIII, v.LXXV, May 1854]
Each original element like the ship of Theseus - Ted Mathys "Key to the Kingdom"
Three times reclined on Thetis' breast - James Beattie "Epistle to the Honourable C. B."
Thor and Odin held their battles by my side - "Danube and the Euxine" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXCVII, v.LXIV, Nov. 1848]
Quivered yet with savage hymns to Thor - J.R. Lowell "Merry England" [Graham's Magazine v.XIX no.5, Nov. 1841]
A thunderbolt by Vulcan forged for Thor - Herbert Randall "Plymouth Rock"
Thoth closed his book of records and wept - Tim Pratt "Ammut in Her Later Years"
The weight of tech against Thoth's scale - Ann K. Schwader "Past Human"
Three musketeers of faithful following - Iris Tree "[Give me, O God, the power of laughter still]"
She borrows the heart from the Tin Man - G. O. Clark "Mary Has a Prophetic Vision"
Titan/Titanic.
Titania.
Through the land of Toulouse-Lautrec - Andre F. Peltier "The Love Theme from Switchblade Sisters"
Trees as tall as Tom Thumb - Paul Carroll "Song [To be able to walk along and see]"
No more let Rome exult in Trajan's name - Luís de Camões "The Lusiad; or, The Discovery of India: Book I. Argument" transl. by William Julius Mickle
Give me the death of Tristan and Isolde - Adolf Wolff "The Call of Sex"
Where Lancelot and Tristram vigil keep - Maurice Baring "In Memoriam, A.H. (Auberon Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas, R.F.C.; killed November 3, 1916)"
Triton.
The regal wine of Tudors or Plantagenets - Henry S. Leigh "To a Timid Leech"
Cavern'd shapes that Typhon bled - Jean de Esque "Betelguese"
The ugly duckling remained ugly - Dean Young "Speech Therapy" [Poetry Oct. 2010]
The phantom ship that brought Ulysses home - Maurice Baring "Greece"
Life-blood in the trench Ulysses made - Arthur Hugh Clough "The Shadow"
Though great Urania guide her flight - Conde Benoist Pallen "Maria Immaculata"
Look into the entrails of Uranus - Audre Lorde "A Woman Speaks"
Even gods must obey what's drawn from Urd's well - Christian Gullette "The Fates"
The spread wings of Uriel uplifted - Daisy Aldan "Everywhere in Constancy, He Is Intoning, Look! Look!"
Past the sceptre of Uriel - Benjamin West Ball "Ariel's Song"
Uriel and Michael were your sons - Vachel Lindsay "To Eve, Man's Dream of Wifehood as Described by Milton"
Rudolph Valentino of the moon - Frank O'Hara "To the Film Industry in Crisis"
Wild Valkyries ride the wind - Arthur Guiterman "The Twilight of the Gods"
How their heroes heard the Valkyriur call - Ione "The Songs of Our Fathers" [The Knickerbocker v.10, no.5, November 1837]
The Valkyriur call to the feast and song in Odin's hall - Ione "The Songs of Our Fathers" [The Knickerbocker v.10, no.5, November 1837]
Half lost in Van Gogh's swarm of colors - Yusef Komunyakaa "Cape Coast Castle"
Passing over the bewildered brilliance of van Gogh - Michael Waters "Homo Sapiens" [Poetry, January 1988]
And weep for Vashti's shame - Frances E.W. Harper "Vashti"
As Vashti used to do - John Masefield "Esther"
Venus.
A magic marker Venus de Milo - B. K. Fischer "Week 30 (Maternity Bathing Suit)"
laughing as he changed the lyrics about Pancho Villa - ire'ne lara silva "me llamo viento"
Whose domain holds Virgil's ashes - Giosue Carducci "Vincenzo Monti" transl. by Frank Sewall
Six ells of Virgil should the crime repair - Reginald Heber "The Whippiad: A Satirical Poem" [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, no.CCCXXXIII, v.LIV, July 1843]
Whom Virgil calms - Lionel Johnson "The Classics"
Beside me no Virgil - Donna Masini "A Gate"
Wear Virgo's diamond in your hair - John Grey "Skywatching"
Virgo halfway across the heavens - Charles Wright "Double Salt"
Voltaire knocks at his daughter's window - Mary Jo Bang "Ritual Gestures"
With Vulcan's rage and mutterings bold - E. Coungeau "To Selene"
These arrows by Vulcan were cunningly done - G. Peele "Cupid's Arrows" [The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction v.14, no.379, 4 July 1829]
A thunderbolt by Vulcan forged for Thor - Herbert Randall "Plymouth Rock"
and instead I woke you with Wagner - Logan February "I Woke You with Wagner,"
Wallace repell'd and smote the myriad foe - Robert Chambers "To Scotland" [Spirit of Chambers' Journal, 1834, Project Gutenberg]
When Walt's celebratory song becomes a post-apocalyptic dirge - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Walt Whitman]
Webster was much possessed by death - T.S. Eliot "Whispers of Immortality"
Stranger than anything Mr. Wells could have ever imagined - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [H.G. Wells]
And Phillis Wheatley prayed - January Gill O'Neil "Old South Meeting House"
Whitman out past Neptune - Dean Young "Winged Purposes" [Poetry Feb. 2009][presumably an asteroid, possibly one named for Walt Whitman, possibly one named for another Whitman]
When Walt's celebratory song becomes a post-apocalyptic dirge - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [Walt Whitman]
Around the dainty tip of Whitman's pen - Frances S. Osgood "Lines to an Idea that Wouldn't 'Come'" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIV no.5, May 1849]
The Wild Huntsman that shoots the hares - Dr. Heinrich Hoffman "The Story of the Wild Huntsman"
Geese in flight become the Wild Hunt - Stephen Leggett "So Happy to Have a Coat with Pockets"
When William Carlos' red wheelbarrow transforms - G. O. Clark "American Poetry 101 Mashup" [William Carlos Williams]
Two guitars fighting over the same late career Willie Nelson - Sophie Fink "The Dogs Don't Forgive Us"
Wise Men lost on their way to Bethlehem - Martin Espada "Flowers and Bullets"
It was no help knowing Wordsworth - Kim Addonizio "Darkening Then Brightening"
And frightening the army of Xerxes away - Oliver Herford "An Alphabet of Celebrities"
'Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods - John Greenleaf Whittier "Snow-Bound"
The dim torch that Zarathustra blew on - Lola Ridge "Death Ray"
Zeus.
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