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TECHNICAL NOTE: The great majority of the links below are to scanned antique books at the Internet Archive, most of them anthologies. Poems frequently run for several pages; when coming to the apparent end of a poem, turn the page to make sure!

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• Anonymous:
  • Amazing Facts About Food Comic poem from the dawn of the age of biochemistry. Signed "H.W."
  • The Antiseptic Pledge
  • An Appeal for Air Modern readers, unlike Nineteenth Century ones, would probably find this poem funnier if it weren't written in rustic dialect.
  • Applied Mathematics An arithmetic joke. Would be funnier if it scanned.
  • The Chemist to His Love
  • A Darwinian Ballad
  • The Dinosaur To a skeleton in a museum. (From Punch; signed "D. M. S.")
  • The Little Star "Scintillate, scintillate, globule orific."
  • The March of Science, in Which are Noticed the Principal Discoveries and Improvements of Modern Times. (1846) Probably by Charles Mead, an American school-teacher and extreme technological optimist.
  • The Microbes
  • The Music of the Spheres: Typical example of pro-science Romantic verse, from Charles Dickens's magazine All The Year Round [1868 August 22].
  • Ozone. Still accented on the last syllable in Nineteenth Century English.
  • Some Psalm
  • Zoölogy

• Anonymous Cambridge Poets:
  • The Academic Disputations Cambridge, 1774: "While gentle Horace wipes Maclaurin's shoes // There Homer learns the theory of light // And tortur'd Ovid learns to sum and write."
  • To a Senior Wrangler throned on Olympus 'midst the favoured few!
  • Spenser Describeth a Grass-Cutting Machine

• Anonymous Limericks:
  • With bold bacilli in a kiss
  • Oh, the flying machine someday will fly
  • Oh, gas may escape A sort of Omar Khayyam in the Industrial Age limerick.
  • A genius who once did aspire
  • The inventor he chortled with glee
  • An inventor set sail from Rangoon
  • Burgess, Clinton Brooks: Mrs. Isoceles Tri
  • A jolly young chemistry tough
  • Microscopic lens doth show Very comforting.
  • Said the aëronaut in his balloon
  • There once were some learned M.D.'s A pun.
  • There was an old man who said, Do
  • There was an old man who said, "Gee!"
  • There was a young lady named Bright The link is to an article at the Quote Investigator website, which concludes that this limerick, published anonymously in 1923 under the title Relativity, was probably written by Canadian botanist A. H. Reginald Buller.
  • A weak but ingenious young guy "Typographically rhymed" poems like this were apparently considered hilarious in the early 1900s, and produced en masse.

• Anonymous Telegraphers' Poems: The telegraph network was the Nineteenth Century internet. Telegraph operators, called "plugs", were young, highly intelligent, generally lower-class, always ambitious. As they drifted from station to station along the lines in search of work, they developed an irreverent "hacker" subculture, complete with its own folk-literature (usually humourous or sentimental, sometimes racy, and often containing ethnic stereotypes, particularly of the Irish).
  • To Annie Ellsworth who sent the first public message on Morse's telegraph.
  • The Carnival of Oshkosh Parody of a Shakespearian tragedy.
  • Downey's Lament Song of an Irish technician.
  • Misplaced Affection About the (nowadays) well-known problems which may arise in online relationships.
  • Out of Adjustment A brief romantic encounter between operators takes an unfortunate turn, but all's well that ends well: "You adjusted my relay, assuaging my tears // And I in return have reciprocated."
  • En Rapport Male and female operators flirting from different continents.
  • The Song of the Plug Operators introduce the human factor that frustrates the system designers: "Breaking on duplex and single strings too; // On all kinds considered a 'bug'."
  • The Song of the Wire transmitting good and bad tidings alike.
  • By Telegraph Another meditation on the system's indifference to the joyous or tragic nature of the information transmitted.
  • The Telegrapher's Song "Every point within the world // Right at our elbow lies."
  • The Telephone The next wave of technology, described in mock-Irish dialect.

• Abbey, Henry:
  • The Giant Spider Zoölogist (or at least cryptozoölogist) versus Shelob, like a Ryder Haggard story in high-quality blank verse.
  • Science and the Soul Despite the regretably didactic title, a very interesting dream-poem about neuroscience, evolution, and other topics, not really anti-science but clearly sympathetic to the claim that science will never fathom life.

• Abbott, H. H.:
  • Black and White "Gaunt poles with shrilling wires their weird did dree."

• Abercrombie, Lascelles:
  • The End of the World. A play in verse about the approach of a comet.

• Ade, George:
  • The Microbe's Serenade Uses the jargon of biology for humourous effect, but without much evidence of understanding the science.

• Allingham, William:
  • Rising of Jupiter Which might have inhabitants: "Heed they at all, for their part, our little one-moon'd planet?"

• Anderson, J. Redwood:
  • The Bridge About a railroad bridge.

• Arnold, Edwin:
  • Florence Nightingale

• Arnold, Matthew:
  • Dover Beach: Perhaps the most famous of all Victorian crisis-of-doubt poems.
    • Musical setting by Samuel Barber. (performed by Hernan Berisso et al.)
  • In Harmony with Nature Who would want to be?
  • Urania ... has not yet found a man worthy of her.

• Atwell, Roy:
  • Some Little Bug "... is going to find you some day."