Death poems
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© Dora Sigerson Shorter
"Lo! I am athirst," said the brown earth,
"And I would drink my fill."
The Mother's Son
© Rudyard Kipling
I have a dream - a dreadful dream -
A dream that is never done.
I watch a man go out of his mind,
And he is My Mother's Son.
Sonnet XIII
© William Shakespeare
O, that you were yourself! but, love, you are
No longer yours than you yourself here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give.
The Two Swans (A Fairy Tale)
© Thomas Hood
I
Immortal Imogen, crown'd queen above
The lilies of thy sex, vouchsafe to hear
A fairy dream in honor of true love
Sonnet XCIX
© William Shakespeare
The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
At the Grave by Jonathan Greene: American Life in Poetry #2 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Many of us have felt helpless when we've tried to assist friends who are dealing with the deaths of loved ones. Here the Kentucky poet and publisher, Jonathan Greene, conveys that feeling of inadequacy in a single sentence. The brevity of the poem reflects the measured and halting speech of people attempting to offer words of condolence:
At the Grave
Sonnet VI
© William Shakespeare
Then let not winter's ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill'd:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure, ere it be self-kill'd.
" by Alfred Austin">The Reply Of Q. Horatius Flaccus To A Roman "Round-Robin"
© Alfred Austin
Good friends, you urge my Odes grow trite,
And that of worthless station,
Of fleeting youth and joy, I write
With endless iteration.
Sonnet LVI.
© Charlotte Turner Smith
THE CAPTIVE ESCAPED
In the wilds of America.
ADDRESSED TO THE HON. MRS O'NEILL.
IF, by his torturing, savage foes untraced,
The Deadliest Sin
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
God! though all other sins on earth persist,
Strike dumb the blatant, loud-mouthed atheist.
A Book Of Strife In The Form Of The Diary Of An Old Soul - June
© George MacDonald
1.
FROM thine, as then, the healing virtue goes
The Two Graves
© William Cullen Bryant
Two low green hillocks, two small gray stones,
Rose over the place that held their bones;
But the grassy hillocks are levelled again,
And the keenest eye might search in vain,
'Mong briers, and ferns, and paths of sheep,
For the spot where the aged couple sleep.
Sonnet LXXXI
© William Shakespeare
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Sonnet LXXIII
© William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Sonnet LXXII
© William Shakespeare
O, lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Sonnet LXVI
© William Shakespeare
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
The American Forest Girl
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
They loos'd the bonds that held their captive's breath;
From his pale lips they took the cup of death;
They quench'd the brand beneath the cypress tree;
"Away," they cried, "young stranger, thou art free!"
Sonnet LXIV
© William Shakespeare
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
Pain
© Harriet Monroe
She heard the children playing in the sun,
And through her window saw the white-stemmed trees
For "Ruggiero And Angelica" By Ingres
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I
A REMOTE sky, prolonged to the sea's brim:
