Death poems
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Friendships Mystery, To my Dearest Lucasia
© Katherine Philips
Come, my Lucasia, since we see
That Miracles Mens faith do move,
By wonder and by prodigy
To the dull angry world lets prove
Theres a Religion in our Love.
From The Spanish Cancioneros
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
II.
Some day, some day
O troubled breast,
Shalt thou find rest.
A Ballad of François Villon, Prince of All Ballad-Makers
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
The Warrior's Prayer
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Long since, in sore distress, I heard one pray,
"Lord, who prevailest with resistless might,
Ever from war and strife keep me away,
My battles fight!"
Contrasted Songs: Song For The Night Of Christ's Resurrection
© Jean Ingelow
(A Humble Imitation)
And birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
"The falling is the constant mate of fear"
© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
The falling is the constant mate of fear,
And feel of emptiness is the feel of fright.
Who throws us the stones from the height --
And stones here refuse the dust to bear?
The New Year
© Emma Lazarus
Look where the mother of the months uplifts
In the green clearness of the unsunned West,
Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts,
Cool, harvest-feeding dews, fine-winnowed light;
Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest
Profusely to requite.
Epilogue to Schiller's Song of the Bell
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mingled the crowds from ev'ry region brought,
And on the stage, in festal pomp array'd
The HOMAGE OF THE ARTS we saw displayed.
A Child My Choice
© Robert Southwell
Let folly praise that fancy loves, I praise and love that Child
Whose heart no thought, whose tongue no word, whose hand no deed defiled.
Sanctuary
© James Russell Lowell
Those not caught, scratch sand up
to sleep against underbellies
of roots and stones.
Todesfuge
© Paul Celan
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined.
Paradise Lost: Book I (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despare:
And him thus answer'd soon his bold Compeer.
Under The Rose
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Oh the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.
The Hunting of the Snark
© Lewis Carroll
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
Night Feeding
© Katha Pollitt
Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death
I lay there dreaming and my magic head
Cullen in the Afterlife
© P. K. Page
He must wake up. He must expose and strip
successive layers to ?nd his soul again.
Where had the rubble come from? He was like
a junkyard—cluttered, ?lled with scrap iron, tin.
As dead as any metal not in use.
A Prelude At Evening
© Robert Laurence Binyon
My spirit was like the lonely air
Before night,
Like hovering cloud that's melted there
In the late light,
