Death poems
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Helen Of Troy
© Sara Teasdale
Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn
The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.
This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead
That sparkled so the day I saw it first,
Lost In The Mist
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
THE thin white snow-streaks pencilling
That mountain's shoulder gray,
While in the west the pale green sky
Smiled back the dawning day,
Christabel
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
She stole along, she nothing spoke,
The sighs she heaved were soft and low,
And naught was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe:
She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
And in silence prayeth she.
Old Tunes
© Henry Lawson
WHEN friends are listening round me, Jack, to hear my dying breath,
And I am lying in a sleep they say will end in death,
Dont notice what the doctor saysand let the nurse complain
Ill tell you how to rouse me if Ill ever wake again.
Prisoners
© Denise Levertov
We taste other food that life,
like a charitable farm-girl,
holds out to us as we pass—
but our mouths are puckered,
a taint of ash on the tongue.
Fragment 3: Come, come thou bleak December wind
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro' me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.
The Toad And Spyder. A Duell
© Richard Lovelace
The all-confounded toad doth see
His life fled with his remedie,
And in a glorious despair
First burst himself, and next the air;
Then with a dismal horred yell
Beats down his loathsome breath to hell.
A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown
© Walt Whitman
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
The Fair Youth Sonnets (18 - 77, 87 - 126)
© William Shakespeare
Comprising the largest grouping of poems, the Fair Youth sonnets are addressed to the same young man in the Procreation Sonnets. But their themes and subjects are more drastically varied.
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"You want a lily"
© Lesbia Harford
You want a lily
And you plead with me
"Give me my lily back."
I went to see
Holy Sonnets: This is my play's last scene
© John Donne
This is my play's last scene; here heavens appoint
My pilgrimage's last mile; and my race,
London By Lamplight
© George Meredith
There stands a singer in the street,
He has an audience motley and meet;
Above him lowers the London night,
And around the lamps are flaring bright.
The Murder of William Remington
© Howard Nemerov
It is true, that even in the best-run state
Such things will happen; it is true,
What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate
Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue
But by the smoke, and not for thought alone
It punishes, but for the thing that’s done.
To Mrs. Leonard on The Death of Her Husband
© Phillis Wheatley
GRIM Monarch! see depriv'd of vital breath,
A young Physician in the dust of death!
Deserted
© Madison Julius Cawein
A broken rainbow on the skies of May
Touching the sodden roses and low clouds,
A Winter Hymn
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O WEARY winds! O winds that wail!
O'er desert fields and ice-locked rills!
O heavens that brood so cold and pale
Above the frozen Norland hills!
The Deserted Village
© Mark van Doren
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain,
The Knight's Epitaph
© William Cullen Bryant
This is the church which Pisa, great and free,
Reared to St. Catharine. How the time-stained walls,
