Death poems
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Ravenna
© Oscar Wilde
(Newdigate prize poem recited in the Sheldonian Theatre Oxford
June
26th, 1878.
The Garden Of Eros
© Oscar Wilde
It is full summer now, the heart of June;
Not yet the sunburnt reapers are astir
Upon the upland meadow where too soon
Rich autumn time, the season's usurer,
Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,
And see his treasure scattered by the wild and spendthrift breeze.
Charmides
© Oscar Wilde
He was a Grecian lad, who coming home
With pulpy figs and wine from Sicily
Stood at his galley's prow, and let the foam
Blow through his crisp brown curls unconsciously,
And holding wave and wind in boy's despite
Peered from his dripping seat across the wet and stormy night.
A Poem For the End of the Century
© Czeslaw Milosz
When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,
I Sleep a Lot
© Czeslaw Milosz
When I couldn't do without alcohol, I drove myself on alcohol,
When I couldn't do without cigarettes and coffee, I drove myself
On cigarettes and coffee.
I was courageous. Industrious. Nearly a model of virtue.
But that is good for nothing.
Child of Europe
© Czeslaw Milosz
1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.
Who in May admire trees flowering
Are better than those who perished.
Dutch Interiors
© Jane Kenyon
Christ has been done to death
in the cold reaches of northern Europe
a thousand thousand times.
Suddenly bread
and cheese appear on a plate
beside a gleaming pewter beaker of beer.
Having it Out with Melancholy
© Jane Kenyon
When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.
The Lost Dancer
© Jean Toomer
Spatial depths of being survive
The birth to death recurrences
Of feet dancing on earth of sand;
Vibrations of the dance survive
Fit the First: ( Hunting of the Snark )
© Lewis Carroll
The crew was complete: it included a Boots--
A maker of Bonnets and Hoods--
A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes--
And a Broker, to value their goods.
Sweeney among the Nightingales
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Apeneck Sweeney spread his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
from The Task, Book IV: The Winter Evening
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Hark! ’tis the twanging horn! o’er yonder bridge,
Peter Quince at the Clavier
© Edwin Muir
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England
© Denise Levertov
Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,
from The Rape of Lucrece
© William Shakespeare
Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under,
Cozening the pillow of a lawful kiss;
from Totem Poem [If every step taken is a step well-lived]
© Luke Davies
And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot
towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path
The Cold Heaven
© William Butler Yeats
Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
An Anatomy of the World
© John Donne
(excerpt)
AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD
Wherein,
by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress
