Death poems
/ page 287 of 560 /
The Redshifting Web
© Wole Soyinka
5 Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise,
the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles.
Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
© John Keats
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedgesedge Grasslike or rushlike plant that grows in wet areas. has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
from Queen Mab: Part VI
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
(excerpt)
"Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,
Sonnets from the Portuguese 22: When our Two Souls
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Nocturnal
© Stephen Edgar
It's midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
My Papa’s Waltz
© Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
Nancy Jane
© Charles Simic
A dark little country store full of gravedigger’s
children buying candy.
(That’s how we looked that night.)
A Lesson in Geography
© Kenneth Rexroth
In the Japanese quarter
A phonograph playing
“Moonlight on ruined castles”
Kojo n'suki
Karenge ya Marenge
© Countee Cullen
Is Indian speech so quaint, so weak, so rude,
So like its land enslaved, denied, and crude,
That men who claim they fight for liberty
Can hear this battle-shout impassively,
Yet to their arms with high resolve have sprung
At those same words cried in the English tongue?
Marrying the Hangman
© Margaret Atwood
She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a
woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present
time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 44
© Alfred Tennyson
How fares it with the happy dead?
For here the man is more and more;
But he forgets the days before
God shut the doorways of his head.
[The Doleful Lay of Clorinda]
© Mary Sidney Herbert
Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain,
That may compassion my impatient grief?
“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.”
© Anthony Evan Hecht
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
Sonnet XXXII: If thou Survive my Well-contented Day
© William Shakespeare
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
Tho Lack of Laurels and of Wreaths Not One
© Trumbull Stickney
Tho lack of laurels and of wreaths not one
Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet
To the Poetry* of Hugh McCrae
© Kenneth Slessor
Uncles who burst on childhood, from the East,
Blown from air, like bearded ghosts arriving,
And are, indeed, a kind of guessed-at ghost
Through mumbled names at dinner-tables moving,
Saturday’s Child
© Countee Cullen
Some are teethed on a silver spoon,
With the stars strung for a rattle;
I cut my teeth as the black raccoon—
For implements of battle.
