Death poems
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She Was a Phantom of Delight
© André Breton
She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
The South
© Emma Lazarus
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.
from Mercian Hymns
© Geoffrey Hill
I
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany
© Carl Sandburg
(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.)
Be sad, be cool, be kind,
remembering those now dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies,
solemn bones under the smooth blue sea,
faces warblown in a falling rain.
from The Bridge: The Dance
© Hart Crane
The swift red flesh, a winter king
Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?
She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;
She spouted arms; she rose with maizeto die.
Sonnet LV: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
© William Shakespeare
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
Sonnets from the Portuguese 1: I Thought how Theocritus
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
To His Mistress
© John Wilmot
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Suns enlivening eye?
On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born
© Charles Lamb
I saw where in the shroud did lurk
A curious frame of Nature's work.
On the Beach at Night Alone
© Walt Whitman
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
Hellas: Chorus
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
Sudden Light
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
The House of Life: 36. Life-in-Love
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair
Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show
For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;
Even so much life endures unknown, even where,
'Mid change the changeless night environeth,
Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
Tender Only to One
© Stevie Smith
Tender only to one
Tender and true
The petals swing
To my fingering
Is it you, or you, or you?
Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)
© Gaius Valerius Catullus
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Sonnets from the Portuguese 7: The Face
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
