Death poems
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Eclogue 5: Menalcas Mopsus
© Publius Vergilius Maro
MENALCAS
Why, Mopsus, being both together met,
You skilled to breathe upon the slender reeds,
I to sing ditties, do we not sit down
Here where the elm-trees and the hazels blend?
Delia XLIX
© Samuel Daniel
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born.
The Bridge of Change
© John Logan
The bridge barely curved that connects the terrible with the tender.
—Rilke
Medea in Athens
© Augusta Davies Webster
Dimly I recall
some prophecy a god breathed by my mouth.
It could not err. What was it? For I think;-
it told his death¹.
Ask What I Shall Give Thee (I)
© John Newton
Come, my soul, thy suit prepare,
Jesus loves to answer prayer;
He Himself has bid thee pray,
Therefore will not say thee nay.
The Mountain Cemetery
© Edgar Bowers
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones.
The Singer
© James Whitcomb Riley
While with Ambition's hectic flame
He wastes the midnight oil,
And dreams, high-throned on heights of fame,
To rest him from his toil,--
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
© Boris Pasternak
In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father’s Ford and the mysterium
The Cottager
© John Clare
True as the church clock hand the hour pursues
He plods about his toils and reads the news,
Intimations Of The Beautiful
© Madison Julius Cawein
The hills are full of prophecies
And ancient voices of the dead;
Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
Pale, visionary presences,
That speak the things no tongue hath said,
No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.
Wild With All Regrets
© Wilfred Owen
Which I shan't manage now. Unless it's yours.
I shall stay in you, friend, for some few hours.
You'll feel my heavy spirit chill your chest,
And climb your throat on sobs, until it's chased
On sighs, and wiped from off your lips by wind.
A Hymn to Childhood
© Li-Young Lee
Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder in the attic?
Randall Jarrell
© Robert Lowell
The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo,
slats of dust distracted by a downdraw;
Sonnet II
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
I FEAR thee not, O Death! nay oft I pine
To clasp thy passionless bosom to mine own,
And on thy heart sob out my latest moan,
Ere lapped and lost in thy strange sleep divine;
To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works
© Phillis Wheatley
TO show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
