Death poems
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The Shepherd's Week : Friday; or, The Dirge
© John Gay
Grubbinol.
Ah Bumkinet! since thou from hence wert gone,
From these sad plains all merriment is flown;
Should I reveal my grief 'twould spoil thy cheer,
And make thine eye o'erflow with many a tear.
Panthea
© Oscar Wilde
. NAY, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,-
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.
The Old Manor House
© Ada Cambridge
An old house, crumbling half away, all barnacled and lichen-grown,
Of saddest, mellowest, softest grey,-with a grand history of its own-
Grand with the work and strife and tears of more than half a thousand years.
Old Age. (Sonnet IV.)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The course of my long life hath reached at last,
In fragile bark o'er a tempestuous sea,
The Violet-Gatherer (From The Danish Of Oehlenslaeger)
© George Borrow
Pale the moon her light was shedding
Oer the landscape far and wide;
Calmly bright, all ills undreading,
Emma wanderd by my side.
A Character
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
YES, madame, I know you better, far better than those can know
Whose plummet of judgment never is dropped to the depths below;
Whose test is a surface-seeming, the glitter of lights that gleam
With a moment's rainbow lustre on the shifting face of the stream.
Soul-Advances
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
HE, who with fervent toil and will austere,
His innate forces and high faculties
Develops ever, with firm aim, and wise,
He only keeps his spiritual vision clear,
Krishna
© Sri Aurobindo
At last I find a meaning of soul's birth
Into this universe terrible and sweet,
I who have felt the hungry heart of earth
Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna's feet.
Voices Of The Night : Midnight Mass For The Dying Year
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Yes, the Year is growing old,
And his eye is pale and bleared!
Death, with frosty hand and cold,
Plucks the old man by the beard,
Sorely, sorely!
At The Birth Of An Age
© Robinson Jeffers
V
GUDRUN (standing this side of the closing curtains; 'with Chrysothemis.
Carling has left her, going
To A Blossoming Pear Tree
© James Wright
I flinched. Both terrified,
We slunk away,
Each in his own way dodging
The cruel darts of the cold.
MacDonalds Raid.A.D. 1780.
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
I REMEMBER it well; 'twas a morn dull and gray,
And the legion lay idle and listless that day,
A thin drizzle of rain piercing chill to the soul,
And with not a spare bumper to brighten the bowl,
By The Bivouac's Fitful Flame
© Walt Whitman
BY the bivouac's fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow;-but first
War's Homecoming
© Edgar Albert Guest
We little thought how much they meant--the bleeding hearts of France,
And British mothers wearing black to mark some troop's advance,
The war was, O, so distant then, the grief so far away,
We couldn't see the weeping eyes, nor hear the women pray.
We couldn't sense the weight of woe that rested on that land,
But now our boy is called to go--to-day, we understand.
To the Virtuosi
© William Shenstone
Hail curious Wights! to whom so fair
The form of mortal flies is!
Who deem those grubs beyond compare,
Which common sense despises.
From: A Poet's Hope
© William Ellery Channing
Lady, there is a hope that all men have,
Some mercy for their faults, a grassy place
To rest in, and a flower-strewn, gentle grave;
Another hope which purifies our race,
That when that fearful bourn forever past,
They may find rest, - and rest so long to last.
Antigone
© George Meredith
The buried voice bespake Antigone.
'O sister! couldst thou know, as thou wilt know,
