Death poems
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The Snowfall
© Franz Werfel
Oh the slow fall of snow,
Its unending blanketing swirl!
Yet my mind's eye was giving shape
To what couldn't be kept hidden,
That in the white drifts each fleck
Is known, weighed, counted.
Windchime
© Tony Hoagland
She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,
My Lady Of Verne
© Madison Julius Cawein
It all comes back as the end draws near;
All comes back like a tale of old!
Shall I tell you all? Will you lend an ear?
You, with your face so stern and cold;
You, who have found me dying here ...
Imitations of Horace
© Alexander Pope
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
Lying
© Lola Ridge
To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Sonnet CVII: Not mine own Fears, nor the Prophetic Soul
© William Shakespeare
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
To Mrs. Strangeways Horner, With A Letter From My Son;
© Mary Barber
Methinks, I see your Friendship rise,
And sparkle in your lovely Eyes.
Your Heir! (I hear you now repeat)
I long to know of your Estate.
Say--Is it an Hibernian Bog,
Where Phoebus seldom shines for Fog?
Holy Sonnets: If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
© John Donne
If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
Peach Blooms
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O! tenderly beautiful, beyond compare,
Flushed from pale pink to deepest rosebud hue--
Nurslings of tranquil sunshine and mild air,
Of shadowless dawn, and silvery twilight dew--
Ye blush and burn, as if your flickering grace
Were love's own tint on Spring's enamored face!
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain
© Dana Gioia
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
The Pass Of The Sierra
© John Greenleaf Whittier
ALL night above their rocky bed
They saw the stars march slow;
The wild Sierra overhead,
The desert's death below.
The Village: Book I
© George Crabbe
The village life, and every care that reigns
O'er youthful peasants and declining swains;
The Peacemaker
© Harriet Monroe
To the world-wanderer Samarkand is near,
The broad Pacific but a narrow strait.
Natalias Resurrection: Sonnet III
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Matron was she of a great Roman house,
And wed in youth to one she might not love;
Her birth, her fortune, her name luminous,
Such as all noblest virtues most behove.
Holy Sonnet VII: At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners
© John Donne
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
Love
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
Blue Monday
© Diane Wakoski
Blue Monday. Monday at 3:00 and
Monday at 5. Monday at 7:30 and
Monday at 10:00. Monday passed under the rippling
California fountain. Monday alone
a shark in the cold blue waters.
