Death poems
/ page 391 of 560 /
American Feuillage
© Walt Whitman
Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you also
be eligible as I am?
How can I but, as here, chanting, invite you for yourself to collect
bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of These States?
The Four Ages of Man
© Anne Bradstreet
1.1 Lo now! four other acts upon the stage,
1.2 Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age.
1.3 The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water,
1.4 Unstable, supple, moist, and cold's his Nature.
Of the Four Ages of Man
© Anne Bradstreet
Lo, now four other act upon the stage,
Childhood and Youth, the Many and Old age:
The first son unto phlegm, grandchild to water,
Unstable, supple, cold and moist's his nature
The Art Of War. Book I.
© Henry James Pye
I'll paint the cruel arm from Bayonne nam'd,
Where savage art a new destruction fram'd,
Their powers combin'd where fire and steel impart,
And point a double wound at every heart.
Epitaphs
© Anne Bradstreet
Her Mother's EpitaphHere lies
A worthy matron of unspotted life,
A loving mother and obedient wife,
A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
© Anne Bradstreet
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death's parting blow are sure to meet.
Another (II)
© Anne Bradstreet
As loving hind that (hartless) wants her deer,
Scuds through the woods and fern with hark'ning ear,
Perplext, in every bush and nook doth pry,
Her dearest deer, might answer ear or eye;
Contemplations
© Anne Bradstreet
1 Sometime now past in the Autumnal Tide,
2 When Ph{oe}bus wanted but one hour to bed,
3 The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,
4 Were gilded o're by his rich golden head.
Prayer In Time Of War
© Edith Nesbit
Now Death is near, and very near,
In this wild whirl of horror and fear,
When round the vessel of our State
Roll the great mountain waves of hate.
God! We have but one prayer to-day -
O Father, teach us how to pray.
Le Mort Joyeux (The Joyful Corpse)
© Charles Baudelaire
Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots
Je veux creuser moi-même une fosse profonde,
Où je puisse à loisir étaler mes vieux os
Et dormir dans l'oubli comme un requin dans l'onde.
Not To The Staring Day
© William Ernest Henley
Not to the staring Day,
For all the importunate questionings he pursues
Governors On Sominex
© David Berman
P.K. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call
to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light
by which he traveled into this and that
Lines Written During The Castlereagh Administration
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
Corpses are cold in the tomb;
Stones on the pavement are dumb;
Abortions are dead in the womb,
And their mothers look palelike the death-white shore
Of Albion, free no more.
Chorus From Oedipus At Colonos
© Anthony Evan Hecht
What is unwisdom but the lusting after
Longevity: to be old and full of days!
For the vast and unremitting tide of years
Casts up to view more sorrowful things than joyful;
A Worldly Death-Bed
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
Hush! speak in accents soft and low,
And treat with careful stealth
More Light! More Light!
© Anthony Evan Hecht
For Heinrich Blucher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
"I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime."
A Hymn To My God
© Sir Henry Wotton
OH thou great Power, in whom I move,
For whom I live, to whom I die,
The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still
© Siegfried Sassoon
The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still
And I remember things I'd best forget.
I Was Sick And In Prison
© Jones Very
Thou hast not left the rough-barked tree to grow
Without a mate upon the river's bank;
