Death poems
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Waking In Winter
© Sylvia Plath
I can taste the tin of the sky -- the real tin thing.
Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.
All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations --
Ellen Irwin Or The Braes Of Kirtle
© William Wordsworth
FAIR Ellen Irwin, when she sate
Upon the braes of Kirtle,
Was lovely as a Grecian maid
Adorned with wreaths of myrtle;
The Borough. Letter II: The Church
© George Crabbe
"WHAT is a Church?"--Let Truth and Reason speak,
They would reply, "The faithful, pure, and meek;
Ode
© Benjamin Jonson
To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius
Cary and Sir Henry Morison.
Mensis Lacrimarum
© William Watson
March, that comes roaring, maned, with rampant paws,
And bleatingly withdraws;
"Your marvelous pronunciation"
© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
Your marvelous pronunciation --
The scorching whistle of birds of prey;
Or should I say: a living impression
Of some sort of silken eyelashes.
Sonnet XXIII: Is It Indeed So?
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead,
Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?
Cadyow Castle
© Sir Walter Scott
When princely Hamilton's abode
Ennobled Cadyow's Gothic towers,
The song went round, the goblet flow'd,,
And revel sped the laughing hours.
On The Dunes
© Sara Teasdale
IF there is any life when death is over,
These tawny beaches will know much of me,
I shall come back, as constant and as changeful
As the unchanging, many-colored sea.
Requiem
© Anna Akhmatova
Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]
At Juliet's Tomb.
© Robert Crawford
This fair woman who is dead
(Sung so sweet of long ago)
Lies not in a mortal bed
Song has made her couch to grow
The Fan : A Poem. Book III.
© John Gay
Learn hence, ye wives; bid vain suspicion cease,
Lose not in sulien discontent your peace.
For when fierce love to jealousy ferments,
A thousand doubts and fears the soul invents,
No more the days in pleasing converse flow,
And nights no more their soft endearments know.
Julia, or the Convent of St. Claire
© Amelia Opie
Stranger, that massy, mouldering pile,
Whose ivied ruins load the ground,
Reechoed once to pious strains
By holy sisters breathed around.
To a Man who Wished to Die
© Leon Gellert
And now that you are dead, - If I should die
Upon this ground,
And open my new eye,
Id leave my body dead,
Just like a garment shed
Without a sound;
The Rites Of Darkness
© Kenneth Patchen
The sleds of the children
Move down the right slope.
To the left, hazed in the tumbling air,
A thousand lights smudge
Within the branches of the old forest,
Like colored moons in a well of milk.
Chanting The Square Deific
© Walt Whitman
But as the seasons, and gravitation-and as all the appointed days,
that forgive not,
I dispense from this side judgments inexorable, without the least
remorse.
Charleston At The Close Of 1863
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
WHAT! still does the mother of treason uprear
Her crest 'gainst the furies that darken her sea,
Unquelled by mistrust, and unblanched by a fear,
Unbowed her proud head, and unbending her knee,
Calm, steadfast and free!
Awake!
© George MacDonald
The stars are all watching;
God's angel is catching
At thy skirts in the darkness deep!
Gold hinges grating,
The mighty dead waiting,
Why dost thou sleep?
