Death poems
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Sonnet LV
© William Shakespeare
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
Fragment IX
© James Macpherson
Conar was mighty in war. Caul
was the friend of strangers. His gates
were open to all; midnight darkened
not on his barred door. Both lived upon
the sons of the mountains. Their bow
was the support of the poor.
The Ghost - Book II
© Charles Churchill
A sacred standard rule we find,
By poets held time out of mind,
The Epic Of The Lion
© Victor Marie Hugo
A Lion in his jaws caught up a child--
Not harming it--and to the woodland, wild
Rubens' Hell
© Kenneth Slessor
VENUS with rosy-cloven rump
And rings of straw-bright flying hair
Looks in the glass that slaves are plying
Not for her own face floating there,
On Dante's Monument, 1818
© Giacomo Leopardi
Though all the nations now
Peace gathers under her white wings,
Sonnet CXLVII
© William Shakespeare
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
Sonnet CXLVI
© William Shakespeare
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
these rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Sonnet CXL
© William Shakespeare
Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;
Lest sorrow lend me words and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
Milton
© Robert Laurence Binyon
An Ode
Soul of England, dost thou sleep,
Lulled or dulled, thy mighty youth forgotten?
Of the world's wine hast thou drunk too deep?
Sonnet CVII
© William Shakespeare
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
A Grammarian's Funeral Shortly After The Revival Of Learning
© Robert Browning
Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Sonnet 99: The forward violet thus did I chide
© 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 check for complexion dwells
The Funeral Tree of the Sokokis. 1756
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Around Sebago's lonely lake
There lingers not a breeze to break
The mirror which its waters make.
Sonnet 81: Or I shall live your epitaph to make
© 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.
The Kind Word
© Ada Cambridge
Speak kindly, wife; the little ones will grow
Fairest and straightest in the warmest sun.
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
© 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 ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
