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Ballad of the Army Carts
Ballad of the Army Carts (Bing che xing, 兵車行) is a narrative poem by the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, written around 751, protesting conscription for frontier wars.
Ballad of the East Gate
Ballad of the East Gate (Dongmen xing, 东门行) is an anonymous Han-dynasty yuefu ballad about a poor man who resolves on a desperate course despite his wife's pleas.
Ballad of the Two Grandfathers
Ballad of the Two Grandfathers (Balada de los dos abuelos) is a 1934 poem by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, spoken through the shadows of his black and white grandfathers.
Ballad of the West Gate
Ballad of the West Gate (西门行, "West Gate Ballad") is an anonymous Han dynasty yuefu ballad, a classic example of Chinese carpe diem poetry about life's brevity.
Ballad of the White Horse
The Ballad of the White Horse (白马篇) is a 28-line poem by the Three Kingdoms poet Cao Zhi celebrating a young frontier knight-errant devoted to defending the state.
Ballad of Xizhou
The Ballad of Xizhou (Xizhou qu, 西洲曲) is an anonymous lyric folk song of the Southern Dynasties (420–589) yuefu tradition, the longest such lyric preserved, describing a woman's longing for her absent lover.
Ballade des dames du temps jadis
Ballade des dames du temps jadis is a 15th-century Middle French poem by François Villon asking what became of celebrated women, with the refrain "But where are the snows of yesteryear?"
Ballade des pendus
The Ballade des pendus is a Middle French poem by François Villon, written in the voice of corpses on a gibbet who ask the living for pity and prayers.
Ballads and Romances
Ballads and Romances, Polish Ballady i romanse, is a cycle of fourteen narrative poems by Adam Mickiewicz, published in Vilnius in 1822 and taken as the beginning of Polish Romanticism.
Banalata Sen
Banalata Sen (বনলতা সেন) is a Bengali poem by Jibanananda Das, first published in 1935 and the title of his third poetry collection, which appeared in 1942.
Banat Su'ad
Banat Su'ad (بانت سعاد), also known as Qaṣīdat al-Burda, is a classical Arabic ode in praise of the Prophet Muhammad by the poet Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr.
Bandhanasthanaya Aniruddhan
Bandhanasthanaya Aniruddhan (ബന്ധനസ്ഥനായ അനിരുദ്ധൻ, "Aniruddhan in Prison") is a 1914 Malayalam khandakavya by Vallathol Narayana Menon that retells the Puranic love story of Usha and Aniruddha.
Bang-e-Dara
Bang-e-Dara (بانگِ درا, "the call of the caravan bell") is the first Urdu poetry collection of Allama Muhammad Iqbal, published in 1924 and including "Sare Jahan Se Achha" and Shikwa.
Bánh trôi nước
Bánh trôi nước is a four-line Nôm poem by Hồ Xuân Hương that describes a boiled rice cake and, by double meaning, the fate of Vietnamese women.
Baptism at the Savica
Baptism at the Savica (Krst pri Savica) is an 1836 narrative poem by the Slovene poet France Prešeren, generally treated as the national epic of Slovene literature.
Barahmasa
Barahmasa (बारहमासा, "twelve months") is a song and poetic genre of the Indian subcontinent in which the twelve months are described through a woman's longing for her absent beloved.
Barbarika (बर्बरीक)
Barbarika (बर्बरीक), also Barbarīk, is a Mahabharata-tradition warrior, grandson of Bhima and son of Ghatotkacha, worshipped as Khatu Shyam Ji at Khatu, Rajasthan; known for his three arrows, his vow to aid the losing side, and his sheesh daan (gift of head) to Krishna.
Basava Ragale
Basava Ragale, fully the Basavarājadevara Ragale, is a Kannada narrative poem by Harihara, the first hagiographic account of the life of the twelfth-century saint Basava.
Basavanna's Vachanas
Basavanna's Vachanas (ಬಸವಣ್ಣನವರ ವಚನಗಳು) are a corpus of over one thousand short Kannada devotional poems by Basavanna, the twelfth-century Virashaiva leader in Karnataka who rejected caste discrimination.
Bashpajali
Bashpajali (ബാഷ്പാഞ്ജലി) is a Malayalam poetry collection by the poet Changampuzha Krishna Pillai, published in 1935, with about fifty lyric poems written between his seventeenth and twenty-first years.
Batrachomyomachia
Batrachomyomachia, also known by the alternate title Batrachomachia, is an ancient Greek mock-epic poem of about 300 verses describing a war between frogs and mice in Homeric style.
Battle South of the City
Battle South of the City (战城南, Zhan chengnan) is an anonymous Han dynasty folk ballad mourning soldiers left unburied, one of the best-known anti-war poems in early Chinese literature.
Bayonet to the Gun
Bayonet to the Gun (Polish: Bagnet na broń) is a patriotic poem by Władysław Broniewski, published in April 1939 and later an informal hymn of the Polish underground.
Be With
Be With is a 2018 poetry collection by Forrest Gander, a book of elegies for his late partner C. D. Wright, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Beach Burial
Beach Burial is a 1944 poem by the Australian poet and war correspondent Kenneth Slessor, describing dead sailors buried in sand under crosses marked "Unknown seaman".
Beatrice Portinari
Beatrice Portinari (Bice, 1266–1290), Florentine daughter of Folco Portinari and wife of Simone de' Bardi, identified through Boccaccio and Pietro Alighieri as Dante's beloved and the guide of the Divine Comedy.
Beatrijs
Beatrijs is a 13th-century Middle Dutch rhymed poem, about 1,038 lines, telling how a nun who leaves her convent for love is forgiven through the Virgin Mary.
Beauty and Love
Beauty and Love (Hüsn ü Aşk) is an allegorical Sufi masnavi in Ottoman Turkish by Şeyh Galib, completed in 1783 and regarded as the last great masnavi of divan literature.
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for Death" (F479/J712), written c. 1862, published as "The Chariot" in 1890, a six-stanza common-meter ride with personified Death toward Eternity, its fourth stanza restored by Johnson in 1955.
Bede's Death Song
Bede's Death Song is a five-line Old English poem on death and judgment, reportedly recited by the Venerable Bede on his deathbed at Jarrow in 735.