Death poems
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Absolution
© Edith Nesbit
He stood beside her, young and strong, and swayed
With pity for the sorrow in her eyes--
Which, as she raised them to his own, conveyed
Into his soul a sort of sad surprise--
Fixed Ideas
© Kenneth Slessor
Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,
Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,
The House of Life: 19. Silent Noon
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fiy
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—
So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.
The Sisters' Tragedy
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Both were young, in life's rich summer yet;
And one was dark, with tints of violet
In hair and eyes, and one was blond as she
Who rose-a second daybreak-from the sea,
Gold-tressed and azure-eyed. In that lone place,
Like dusk and dawn, they sat there face to face.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 3
© Alfred Tennyson
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?
Palindrome
© Paul Eluard
There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
Feeling Fucked Up
© Tony Harrison
Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
The Valley Of Fear
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
When close to that Valley your footsteps shall fare,
Turn, turn to the Roadway of Prayer-
The beautiful Roadway of Prayer.
The Modern Mother
© Alice Meynell
Oh what a kiss
With filial passion overcharged is this!
To this misgiving breast
The child runs, as a child ne'er ran to rest
Upon the light heart and the unoppressed.
Erinna
© Sara Teasdale
They sent you in to say farewell to me,
No, do not shake your head; I see your eyes
Autumn Song
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
Patroling Barnegat
© Walt Whitman
Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,
Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,
A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
That savage trinity warily watching.
The Heretic In The Temple
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
Lone did I go within the ancient place,
With hushèd voice, and slow and reverent tread;
Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith)
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Vicisti, Galilæe.
I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
An Old Tale Re-Told
© Madison Julius Cawein
Well, the laughter of Yule was turned to tears
For them and for us. We saw the glare
Of torches that hurried from chamber to stair;
And we heard the castle re-echo her name,
But neither to them nor to us she came.
And that was the last of Clara of Clare.
Song
© George Darley
Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,
Lull'd by the faint breezes sighing through her hair;
Time to Come
© Walt Whitman
O, Death! a black and pierceless pall
Hangs round thee, and the future state;
No eye may see, no mind may grasp
That mystery of fate.
Sunflower Sutra
© Allen Ginsberg
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
Any Lifetime
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Any lifetime that is spent without seeing the master
Is either death in disguise or a deep sleep.
The water that pollutes you is poison;
The poison that purifies you is water.
