Death poems
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Sonnet 64: "When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd..."
© William Shakespeare
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
The Alphabet
© Karl Shapiro
The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
The Camp-Fires Of My Friend
© Henry Van Dyke
Thou hast taken me into thy tent of the world, O God,
Beneath thy blue canopy I have found shelter,
Therefore thou wilt not deny me the right of a guest.
Sonnet LXXXIX: The Trees of the Garden
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Ye who have passed Death's haggard hills; and ye
Whom trees that knew your sires shall cease to know
Whitsun
© Sylvia Plath
This is not what I meant:
Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows,
Bald eyes or petrified eggs,
Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets,
Lard-pale, sipping the thin
Air like a medicine.
The Present; Or, The Bag Of The Bees
© Robert Herrick
Fly to my mistress, pretty pilfering bee,
And say thou bring'st this honey-bag from me;
When on her lip thou hast thy sweet dew placed,
Mark if her tongue but slyly steal a taste;
If so, we live; if not, with mournful hum,
Toll forth my death; next, to my burial come.
Awakening
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Out of first sleep as they awoke
The moon had stolen upon her face.
It seemed that they had opened eyes
New on another world and place.
The Seas of England
© Walter de la Mare
The seas of England are our old delight:
Let the loud billow of the shingly shore
Sing freedom on her breezes evermore
To all earths ships that sailing heave in sight!
Oer The Wide Earth, On Mountain And On Plain
© William Wordsworth
O'ER the wide earth, on mountain and on plain,
Dwells in the affections and the soul of man
A Godhead, like the universal PAN;
But more exalted, with a brighter train:
Dance Of The Hanged Men
© Arthur Rimbaud
On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.
Slave And Emperor
© Alfred Noyes
Yet, in the darkest hour of all,
When black defeat began,
The Emperor heard the mountains quake,
He felt the graves beneath him shake,
He watched his legions rally and break,
And he whimpered as they ran.
To Sylvia
© Giacomo Leopardi
O Sylvia, dost thou remember still
That period of thy mortal life,
When beauty so bewildering
Shone in thy laughing, glancing eyes,
As thou, so merry, yet so wise,
Youth's threshold then wast entering?
Craven
© Sir Henry Newbolt
Over the turret, shut in his iron-clad tower,
Craven was conning his ship through smoke and flame;
Gun to gun he had battered the fort for an hour,
Now was the time for a charge to end the game.
As In The Midst Of Battle There Is Room
© George Santayana
As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;
As gossips whisper of a trinket's worth
Spied by the death-bed's flickering candle-gloom;
The Marriage Of Geraint
© Alfred Tennyson
'Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud;
Turn thy wild wheel through sunshine, storm, and cloud;
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.
November, 1851
© George MacDonald
Why wilt thou stop and start?
Draw nearer, oh my heart,
And I will question thee most wistfully;
Gather thy last clear resolution
To look upon thy dissolution.
The Devil's Thoughts
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From his brimstone bed at break of day
A walking the DEVIL is gone,
To visit his little snug farm of the earth
And see how his stock went on.
The Right Way
© Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev
Birth of the word is by agony molded,
Through earthly life it is quietly going,
It is a stranger, which drinks from the golden
Pitcher the drops of the savages mourning.
