Death poems
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Human Life, On The Denial Of Immortality
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
Travel Papers
© Carolyn Forche
Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur.
—René Char
By boat to Seurasaari where
the small fish were called vendace.
A man blew a horn of birchwood
toward the nightless sea.
The Passing Show
© Ambrose Bierce
I
I know not if it was a dream. I viewed
A city where the restless multitude,
Between the eastern and the western deep
Had reared gigantic fabrics, strong and rude.
Poems
© Anselm Hollo
i
thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.
ii
The Three Graves. A Fragment Of A Sexton's Tale
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The grapes upon the Vicar's wall
Were ripe as ripe could be;
And yellow leaves in sun and wind
Were falling from the tree.
The Garden
© Jones Very
I saw the spot where our first parents dwelt;
And yet it wore to me no face of change,
Lux In Tenebris
© George Essex Evans
So set they discord in the sweetest singing,
And a sharp thorn about the fairest rose;
And doubt around the cross where faith was clinging,
And fear to haunt the regions of repose;
And dimmed mens eyes, so that they should not see,
Like Gods, the vistas of futurity.
Ulla, Or The Adjuration
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
'Twas Ulla's voice–alone she stood
In the Iceland summer night,
Far gazing o'er a glassy flood,
From a dark rock's beetling height.
The Universal Prayer
© Alexander Pope
Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
The Peasant Girl Of The Rhone
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
There is but one place in the world:
Thither where he lies buried!
Anon
Home
© Edgar Albert Guest
It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,
A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam
Answered
© Madison Julius Cawein
Do you remember how that night drew on?
That night of sorrow, when the stars looked wan
The Japanese Fisherman
© Nazim Hikmet
A young Japanese fisherman was killed
by a cloud at sea.
I heard this song from his friends,
one lurid yellow evening on the Pacific.
Of Love To God
© John Bunyan
When I do this begin to apprehend,
My heart, my soul, and mind, begins to bend
[Ladies, who of my lord would fain be told]
© Gaspara Stampa
Ladies, who of my lord would fain be told,
Picture a gentle knight, full sweet to see,
The Good, Great Man
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits
Or any merit that which he obtains."
Hymns to the Night : 5
© Novalis
In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls - the earth was boundless - the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean's dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine - poured out by Youth-abundance - a god in the grape-clusters - a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves - love's sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies - Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape -
That fearsome to the merry tables strode,
