Death poems
/ page 301 of 560 /
At the Justice Department November 15, 1969
© Denise Levertov
Brown gas-fog, white
beneath the street lamps.
The Troubadour. Canto 4
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
But he was safe!--that very day
Farewell, it had been her's to say;
And he was gone to his own land,
To seek another maiden's hand.
I like your books
© Charles Bukowski
In the betting line the other
day
man behind me asked,
"are you Henry
Chinaski?"
The Drowned Children
© Louise Gluck
And yet they hear the names they used
like lures slipping over the pond:
What are you waiting for
come home, come home, lost
in the waters, blue and permanent.
A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar
© Robert Duncan
I
The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
god-step at the margins of thought,
quick adulterous tread at the heart.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
© Thomas Gray
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
The Plate
© Anthony Evan Hecht
Now he has silver in him. When sometime
Death shall boil down unnecessary fat
Twenty Questions
© David Lehman
Why did the moth fly into the flame? Was it for the same reason
That Achilles died young? Who gets more fun out of sex,
Mrs. Benjamin Pantier
© Edgar Lee Masters
I know that he told that I snared his soul
With a snare which bled him to death.
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
© Patrick Kavanagh
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
Louisa To Strephon
© Jonathan Swift
Ah! Strephon, how can you despise
Her, who without thy pity dies!
To Strephon I have still been true,
And of as noble blood as you;
The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn
© Andrew Marvell
I in a golden vial will
Keep these two crystal tears, and fill
It till it do o’erflow with mine,
Then place it in Diana’s shrine.
The Reading Club
© Patricia Goedicke
Is dead serious about this one, having rehearsed it for two weeks
they bring it right into the Odd Fellows Meeting Hall.
Riding the backs of the Trojan Women,
In Euripides’ great wake they are swept up,
Stanzas To the Memory Of George III
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
'Among many nations was there no King like him.' Nehemiah, xiii, 26.
'Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?' 2 Samuel, iii, 38.
Ode To Autumn
© Lord Alfred Douglas
Thou sombre lady of down-bended head,
And weary lashes drooping to the cheek,
L'Envoi
© James Russell Lowell
Whether my heart hath wiser grown or not,
In these three years, since I to thee inscribed,
The Closet
© Bill Knott
(...after my Mother’s death)
Here not long enough after the hospital happened
I find her closet lying empty and stop my play
And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers
Which quiver, airy, released. They appear to enjoy
Sonnet CXLVII: My love is a fever, longing still
© William Shakespeare
My love is a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
A Clear Midnight
© Walt Whitman
THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
