Death poems
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Love Is Enough: Songs I-IX
© William Morris
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Beatrice
© Sara Teasdale
Send out the singers - let the room be still;
They have not eased my pain nor brought me sleep.
A Death in the Desert
© Robert Browning
Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept:
It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,
Was burned, and could not write the chronicle.
Experience
© Edith Wharton
But otherwise Fate wills it, for, behold,
Our gathered strength of individual pain,
When Time’s long alchemy hath made it gold,
Dies with us—hoarded all these years in vain,
Since those that might be heir to it the mould
Renew, and coin themselves new griefs again.
The Waste Land
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
Shore Line
© Carl Rakosi
Barrel-chested military water
rushes in a mass
to break the shore earth
into stonekind.
The House of Life: 66. The Heart of the Night
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!
O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,
Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath:
That when the peace is garner'd in from strife,
The work retriev'd, the will regenerate,
This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!
O Carib Isle!
© Hart Crane
And yet suppose
I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,
Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave
Squared off so carefully. Then
The Lotos-eaters
© Alfred Tennyson
"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land,
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
Nineteen-Fourteen: Peace
© Rupert Brooke
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!
A Happy Childhood
© William Matthews
No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo
My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air
The Ready Artists
© Edgar Albert Guest
The green is in the meadow and the blue is in the sky,
And all of Nature's artists have their colors handy by;
With a few days bright with sunshine and a few nights free from frost
They will start to splash their colors quite regardless of the cost.
There's an artist waiting ready at each bleak and dismal spot
To paint the flashing tulip or the meek forget-me-not.
Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 1. The Musician's Tale; The Saga of King Olaf XIII. -- The Building Of
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Thorberg Skafting, master-builder,
In his ship-yard by the sea,
Whistling, said, "It would bewilder
Any man but Thorberg Skafting,
Any man but me!"
Father, Child, Water by Gary Dop: American Life in Poetry #178 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2
© Ted Kooser
We mammals are ferociously protective of our young, and we all know not to wander in between a sow bear and her cubs. Here Minnesota poet Gary Dop, without a moment's hesitation, throws himself into the water to save a frightened child.
Father, Child, Water
If I Should Die Tonight
© Arabella Eugenia Smith
If I should die to-night,
My friends would look upon my quiet face
Airs and Angels: This Night Only
© Kenneth Rexroth
[Erik Satie: "Gymnopédie #1"]
Moonlight now on Malibu
Now He Knows All There Is To Know. Now He Is Acquainted With The Day And Night
© Delmore Schwartz
Whose wood this is I think I know:
He made it sacred long ago:
He will expect me, far or near
To watch that wood immense with snow.
The Calm
© John Donne
Our storm is past, and that storm's tyrannous rage,
A stupid calm, but nothing it, doth 'suage.
