Death poems
/ page 270 of 560 /
The Grave
© Robert Blair
While some affect the sun, and some the shade,
Some flee the city, some the hermitage;
Their aims as various, as the roads they take
In journeying through life;the task be mine,
welsh experience
© Rg Gregory
called out by the sun
this easter saturday morning
i'm sitting on a bank
in pistyllgwyn
Winged Man
© Stephen Vincent Benet
The moon, a sweeping scimitar, dipped in the stormy straits,
The dawn, a crimson cataract, burst through the eastern gates,
The cliffs were robed in scarlet, the sands were cinnabar,
Where first two men spread wings for flight and dared the hawk afar.
The Quality of Courage
© Stephen Vincent Benet
Was it not better so to lie?
The fight was done. Even gods tire
Of fighting. . . . My way was the wrong.
Now I should drift and drift along
To endless quiet, golden peace . . .
And let the tortured body cease.
Benedetta Minelli
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
IT is near morning. Ere the next night fall
I shall be made the bride of heaven. Then home
To my still marriage chamber I shall come,
And spouseless, childless, watch the slow years crawl.
The Hemp
© Stephen Vincent Benet
Captain Hawk scourged clean the seas
(Black is the gap below the plank)
From the Great North Bank to the Caribbees
(Down by the marsh the hemp grows rank).
The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun
© Stephen Vincent Benet
No herbage broke the barren flats of land,
No winds dared loiter within smiling trees,
Nor were there any brooks on either hand,
Only the dry, bright sand,
Naked and golden, lay before the seas.
Poor Devil!
© Stephen Vincent Benet
Well, I was tired of life; the silly folk,
The tiresome noises, all the common things
I loved once, crushed me with an iron yoke.
I longed for the cool quiet and the dark,
Morning Land
© George Essex Evans
Around and beneath, the dull grey mist and the sullen roar of the sea,
Scant footing-place on the sheer cliffs facewith death for a penalty;
But afar and above there is rest and love, there is hope for brain and hand,
The valleys fair and the crystal air and the peaks of Morning Land.
Colors
© Stephen Vincent Benet
(For D. M. C.) The little man with the vague beard and guise
Pulled at the wicket. "Come inside!" he said,
"I'll show you all we've got now -- it was size
You wanted? -- oh, dry colors! Well" -- he led
A Song Of Changgan
© Li Po
My hair had hardly covered my forehead.
I was picking flowers, paying by my door,
When you, my lover, on a bamboo horse,
Came trotting in circles and throwing green plums.
We lived near together on a lane in Ch'ang-kan,
Both of us young and happy-hearted.
The Givers Of Life
© Bliss William Carman
I.
WHO called us forth out of darkness and gave us the gift of life,
Who set our hands to the toiling, our feet in the field of strife?
Darkly they mused, predestined to knowledge of viewless things,
The Show
© Wilfred Owen
My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.
A Terre
© Wilfred Owen
Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell,
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me -- brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.
Apologia Pro Poemate Meo
© Wilfred Owen
I, too, saw God through mud --
The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.
Greater Love
© Wilfred Owen
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
Asleep
© Wilfred Owen
Under his helmet, up against his pack,
After the many days of work and waking,
Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.
And in the happy no-time of his sleeping,
A Poor Christian Looks At The Ghetto
© Czeslaw Milosz
I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.
He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch
Who has sat much in the light of candles
Reading the great book of the species.
The Question.
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Beside us in our seeking after pleasures,
Through all our restless striving after fame,
