Death poems
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Lines In Memory Of William Leggett
© William Cullen Bryant
The earth may ring, from shore to shore,
With echoes of a glorious name,
But he, whose loss our tears deplore,
Has left behind him more than fame.
The Slave Ships
© John Greenleaf Whittier
"ALL ready?" cried the captain;
"Ay, ay!" the seamen said;
"Heave up the worthless lubbers,
The dying and the dead."
Ghasta Or, The Avenging Demon!!!
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hark! the owlet flaps her wing,
In the pathless dell beneath,
Hark! night ravens loudly sing,
Tidings of despair and death.--
The Queen's Marie
© Andrew Lang
Marie Hamilton's to the kirk gane,
Wi ribbons in her hair;
The king thought mair o Marie Hamilton,
Than ony that were there.
M'Pherson's Rant
© Robert Burns
Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong,
The wretch's destinie!
M'Pherson's time will not be long
On yonder gallows-tree.
Goatsucker
© Sylvia Plath
So fables say the Goatsucker moves, masked from men's sight
In an ebony air, on wings of witch cloth,
Well-named, ill-famed a knavish fly-by-night,
Yet it never milked any goat, nor dealt cow death
And shadows only-cave-mouth bristle beset-
Cockchafers and the wan, green luna moth.
Mogg Megone - Part II.
© John Greenleaf Whittier
"O, tell me, father, can the dead
Walk on the earth, and look on us,
And lay upon the living's head
Their blessing or their curse?
For, O, last night she stood by me,
As I lay beneath the woodland tree!"
Sonnet XCI: Lost On Both Sides
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
As when two men have loved a woman well,
Each hating each, through Love's and Death's deceit;
Earl Rodericks Bride
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
It was the Black Earl Roderick
Who rode towards the south;
Womanhood.
© Robert Crawford
She feels the world, it touches her
Like a weird thing she needs must know,
While all her fears and fancies stir
As in a death-dream long ago.
The Troubadour
© Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
THE wind blows salt from off the sea
And sweet from where the land lies green;
I travel down the great highway
That runs so straight and white between--
I watch the sea-wind strain the sheet,
The land-wind toss the yellow wheat!
The Key (A Moorish Romance)
© Thomas Hood
"On the east coast, towards Tunis, the Moors still preserve the key of their ancestors' houses in Spain; to which country they still express the hopes of one day returning and again planting the crescent on the ancient walls of the Alhambra."Scott's Travels in Morocco and Algiers.
"Is Spain cloven in such a manner as to want closing?" Sancho Panza in Don Quixote
The Moor leans on his cushion,
Dysthanatos
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
BY no dry death another king goes down
The way of kings. Yet may no free mans voice,
Eclogue VII
© Virgil
Corydon.
"Libethrian Nymphs, who are my heart's delight,
Grant me, as doth my Codrus, so to sing-
Next to Apollo he- or if to this
We may not all attain, my tuneful pipe
Here on this sacred pine shall silent hang."
Skin Diving
© William Matthews
The snorkel is the easiest woodwind.
Two notes in the chalumeau:
rising and falling.
Here is the skin of sleep,
the skin of reading, surfaces
Death's Subtle Ways
© James Shirley
Victorious men of earth, no more
Proclaim how wide your empires are;
Though you bind in every shore
And your triumphs reach as far
From Phantasmion - One Face Alone
© Sara Coleridge
ONE face alone, one face alone,
These eyes require;
The Pilgrimage
© George Herbert
I travell'd on, seeing the hill, where lay
My expectation.
A long it was and weary way:
The gloomy cave of Desperation
I left on th' one, and on the other side
The Rock of Pride.
An Eclogue From Virgil
© Eugene Field
(The exile Meliboeus finds Tityrus in possession of his own farm,
restored to him by the emperor Augustus, and a conversation ensues. The
poem is in praise of Augustus, peace and pastoral life.)
