Death poems
/ page 286 of 560 /
The Death of Lincoln
© William Cullen Bryant
Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare,
Gentle and merciful and just!
Sunt Leones
© Stevie Smith
The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena
By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes
© Thomas Gray
Twas on a lofty vases side,
Where Chinas gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
The Rebel
© Hilaire Belloc
There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homesteads and our native grounds.
Sonnet LXIV: When I have Seen by Time's Fell Hand Defaced
© William Shakespeare
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
A Marriage Poem
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
What does it mean when a woman says,
“my husband,”
if she sits all day in the tub;
if she worries her life like a dog a rat;
if her husband seems familiar but abstract,
a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use.
Ulysses
© Alfred Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
from The Seasons: Winter
© James Thomson
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
The Past
© Henry Timrod
To-days most trivial act may hold the seed
Of future fruitfulness, or future dearth;
Oh, cherish always every word and deed!
The simplest record of thyself hath worth.
The Operation
© Anne Sexton
Clean of the body’s hair,
I lie smooth from breast to leg.
All that was special, all that was rare
is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
Identity
© William Stanley Merwin
When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog
somewhere in a Germany that has
[My prime of youth is but a frost of cares]
© Chidiock Tichborne
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
His death in Benares
© Kabir
his front yard
is the true Benares
— Devara Dasimayya,
tr. A.K. Ramanujan
His death in Benares
Won’t save the assassin
From certain hell,
It was not Death, for I stood up, (355)
© Emily Dickinson
It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down -
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.
The Seekonk Woods
© Washington Allston
When first I walked here I hobbled
along ties set too close together
Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night
© Walt Whitman
Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;
When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
