Death poems
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Love is the Water of Life
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Everything other than love for the most beautiful God
though it be sugar- eating.
What is agony of the spirit?
To advance toward death without seizing
hold of the Water of Life.
Looking into History
© Lola Ridge
Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye
Stand in a land subdued beyond belief.
Belief might lend them life again. I try
Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief
The Bear Hunt
© Abraham Lincoln
A wild-bear chace, didst never see?
Then hast thou lived in vain.
Thy richest bump of glorious glee,
Lies desert in thy brain.
Easter Even
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
There is nothing more that they can do
For all their rage and boast;
Caiaphas with his blaspheming crew,
Herod with his host,
The Purgatory Of St. Patrick - Act I
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
KING. Yes, from this rocky height,
Nigh to the sun, that with one starry light
Its rugged brow doth crown,
Headlong among the salt waves leaping down
Let him descend who so much pain perceives;
There let him raging die who raging lives.
Eliza Harris
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Like a fawn from the arrow, startled and wild,
A woman swept by us, bearing a child;
In her eye was the night of a settled despair,
And her brow was o’ershaded with anguish and care.
Death.
© Robert Crawford
The natural death we each night undergo
Should teach us that our passing's but a sleep,
Which we beyond the body's shadow may,
Even as a garment of the day we doff,
Put off for ever, being then no more
Nor less, indeed, than we have been before.
Moonrise
© Sylvia Plath
Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves.
I'll go out and sit in white like they do,
Doing nothing. July's juice rounds their nubs.
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
The Sheep in the Ruins
© Archibald MacLeish
Works of soul—
Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder:
Through the mid night to the stroke of one!
Works of grace! Works of wonder!
All this have we done and more—
And seen—what have we not seen?—
On the Death of Anne Brontë
© Octavio Paz
THERE 's little joy in life for me,
And little terror in the grave;
I 've lived the parting hour to see
Of one I would have died to save.
W. Gilmore Simms
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
THE swift mysterious seasons rise and set;
The omnipotent years pass o'er us, bright or dun;--
Dawns blush, and mid-days burn, 'till scarce aware
Of what deep meaning haunts our twilight air,
Life Well Lost
© Giordano Bruno
Winged by desire and thee, O dear delight!
As still the vast and succoring air I tread,
Note to Reality
© Tony Hoagland
but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass
thrust up above the January snow.
Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse,
from the museum series on European masters.
The Ballad of the Black-Sheep
© Henry Lawson
A black-sheep, from England, who worked on the run
Riding where the stockmen ride
He sat by the hut when the days work was done
Lone huts where the black sheep bide.
Im tired of my life! to his lone self said he,
My girl and my country are both done with me!
Augustus Peabody Gardner
© John Jay Chapman
I SEEwithin my spiritmystic walls,
And slender windows casting hallowed light
Ferdiah; Or, The Fight At The Ford
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Time is it, O Cuchullin, to arise,
Time for the fearful combat to prepare;
For hither with the anger in his eyes,
To fight thee comes Ferdiah called the Fair.
The Wires of the Night
© Billy Collins
I thought about his death for so many hours,
tangled there in the wires of the night,
that it came to have a body and dimensions,
more than a voice shaking over the telephone
or the black obituary boldface of name and dates.
