Death poems
/ page 211 of 560 /On Queen Anne's Peace, Anno 1713
© Thomas Parnell
Mother of plenty, daughter of the skies,
Sweet Peace, the troubl'd world's desire, arise;
Around thy poet weave thy summer shades,
Within my fancy spread thy flow'ry meads,
Amongst thy train soft ease and pleasure bring,
And thus indulgent sooth me whilst I sing.
My Annual
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
How long will this harp which you once loved to hear
Cheat your lips of a smile or your eyes of a tear?
How long stir the echoes it wakened of old,
While its strings were unbroken, untarnished its gold?
The Bell-Founder Part III - Vicissitude And Rest
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
O Erin! thou broad-spreading valley--thou well-watered land of fresh
streams,
When I gaze on thy hills greenly sloping, where the light of such
loveliness beams,
Sonnet III: Unlike Are We, Unlike
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.
After Death
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
THE passionate sobs of the dear friends that came
To look their last upon my living frame,
And catch the fainting accents of my breath,
That fluttered in the atmosphere of death,
Psalm Of The West
© Sidney Lanier
Master, Master, break this ban:
The wave lacks Thee.
Oh, is it not to widen man
Stretches the sea?
Oh, must the sea-bird's idle van
Alone be free?
Epitaph II
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
Nature, a jealous mistress, laid him low.
He woo'd and won her; and, by love made bold,
She showed him more than mortal man should know,
Then slew him lest her secret should be told.
The Giant Puff-Ball
© Edmund Blunden
From what sad star I know not, but I found
Myself new-born below the coppice rail,
No bigger than the dewdrops and as round,
In a soft sward, no cattle might assail.
Natures Way
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
If thou didst slip 'neath the encircling wave
And found sure death in coral groves below,
Of The Nature Of Things: Book II - Part 04 - Absence Of Secondary Qualities
© Lucretius
Next, they who deem that feeling objects can
From feeling objects be create, and these,
In turn, from others that are wont to feel
Italy : 30. Rome
© Samuel Rogers
I am in Rome! Oft as the morning-ray
Visits these eyes, waking at once I cry,
Whence this excess of joy? What has befallen me?
And from within a thrilling voice replies,
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
© George Gordon Byron
The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze--
A funeral pile.
Ressurection
© John Donne
Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul
Shallthough she now be in extreme degree
The Wanderer's Lament
© Arthur Symons
Why am I fettered with eternal change?
I follow after changeless love, and find
The Victories Of Love. Book II
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
II
From Lady Clitheroe To Mary Churchill
Geraint And Enid
© Alfred Tennyson
Then Enid pondered in her heart, and said:
'I will go back a little to my lord,
And I will tell him all their caitiff talk;
For, be he wroth even to slaying me,
Far liefer by his dear hand had I die,
Than that my lord should suffer loss or shame.'
The Creek of the Four Graves [Early Version]
© Charles Harpur
And feeling thus by habit, that poor man
Though the black shadow of untimely death
Hopelessly thickened under every stroke,
Upstruggled desperate, until at last,
One, as in mercy, gave him to the dust,
With all his sorrows.
Sappho I
© Sara Teasdale
MIDNIGHT, and in the darkness not a sound,
So, with hushed breathing, sleeps the autumn night;
Only the white immortal stars shall know,
Here in the house with the low-lintelled door,