Death poems
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Paschal
© Robert Pinsky
Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great
The Monument Of Francis Makemie
© Henry Van Dyke
(Presbyter of Christ in America, 1683-1708)
To thee, plain hero of a rugged race,
Bright Star
© John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
Ode To Maize
© Pablo Neruda
But, poet, let
history rest in its shroud;
praise with your lyre
the grain in its granaries:
sing to the simple maize in the kitchen.
Thanatopsis
© William Cullen Bryant
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi.
"O Cæsar, we who are about to die
Salute you!" was the gladiators' cry
In the arena, standing face to face
With death and with the Roman populace.
I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris
© Louis Simpson
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris
I stood alone in a deserted square.
The night was trembling with a violet
Expectancy. At the far edge it moved
And rumbled; on that flickering horizon
The guns were pumping color in the sky.
Illumination
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Is it joy, or is it peace,
Senses' magical release,
That triumphant swells my heart
Where I walk the fields apart?
Tomb (Of Verlaine)
© Stéphane Mallarme
The black rock enraged that the north wind rolls it on
Will not stop itself, nor, under pious hands, still
Cease testing its resemblance to human ill
As if to bless some fatal cast of bronze.
An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley
© Jupiter Hammon
I
O come you pious youth! adore
The wisdom of thy God,
In bringing thee from distant shore,
To learn His holy word.
Eccles. xii.
Passage over Water
© Robert Duncan
We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,
lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.
The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last
under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.
The Death Of The Pauper Child
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
Hush, mourning mother, wan and pale!
No sobsno grieving now:
Medusa
© Sylvia Plath
Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous
repair.
Spring Snow
© William Matthews
Here comes the powdered milk I drank
as a child, and the money it saved.
Here come the papers I delivered,
the spotted dog in heat that followed me home
The Boy’s Answer to the Blackmoor
© Henry King
Black maid, complain not that I fly,
When Fate commands antipathy:
A Witch
© William Barnes
There's thik wold hag, Moll Brown, look zee, jus' past!
I wish the ugly sly wold witch
