Death poems
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The Four Bridges
© Jean Ingelow
I love this gray old church, the low, long nave,
The ivied chancel and the slender spire;
No less its shadow on each heaving grave,
With growing osier bound, or living brier;
I love those yew-tree trunks, where stand arrayed
So many deep-cut names of youth and maid.
How the Land was Won
© Henry Lawson
The future was dark and the past was dead
As they gazed on the sea once more
But a nation was born when the immigrants said
"Good-bye!" as they stepped ashore!
May-Day
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world rolls round,--mistrust it not,--
Befalls again what once befell;
All things return, both sphere and mote,
And I shall hear my bluebird's note,
And dream the dream of Auburn dell.
To Holmes: On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday
© James Russell Lowell
Dear Wendell, why need count the years
Since first your genius made me thrill,
If what moved then to smiles or tears,
Or both contending, move me still?
A Song of Brave Men
© Henry Lawson
Man, is the Sea your master? Sea, and is man your slave?
This is the song of brave men who never know they are brave:
Ceaselessly watching to save you, stranger from foreign lands,
Soundly asleep in your state room, full sail for the Goodwin Sands!
Life is a dream, they tell us, but life seems very real,
When the lifeboat puts out from Ramsgate, and the buggers put out from Deal!
The Old Stoic
© Emily Jane Brontë
Riches I hold in light esteem,
And love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanish'd with the morn:
A Creed
© Edgar Albert Guest
TO live in hearts, not monuments of stone,
To live on humble lips that nightly pray,
To be remembered when the soul has flown
As one who smiled and passed along the way.
The Iron Wedding Rings
© Henry Lawson
In these days of peace and money, free to all the Commonweal,
There are ancient dames in Buckland wearing wedding rings of steel;
Wedding rings of steel and iron, worn on wrinkled hands and old,
And the wearers would not give them, not for youth nor wealth untold.
Out Back
© Henry Lawson
The old year went, and the new returned, in the withering weeks of drought,
The cheque was spent that the shearer earned,
and the sheds were all cut out;
The publican's words were short and few,
and the publican's looks were black --
And the time had come, as the shearer knew, to carry his swag Out Back.
Faces In The Street
© Henry Lawson
They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My window-sill is level with the faces in the street
Sonnet: To Time
© Sylvia Plath
Today we move in jade and cease with garnet
Amid the ticking jeweled clocks that mark
Our years. Death comes in a casual steel car, yet
We vaunt our days in neon and scorn the dark.
Of The Wooing Of Halbiorn The Strong
© William Morris
A STORY FROM THE LAND-SETTLING BOOK OF ICELAND, CHAPTER XXX.
Life
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As late I journey'd o'er the extensive plain
Where native Otter sports his scanty stream,
Musing in torpid woe a Sister's pain,
The glorious prospect woke me from the dream.
To The Muse Of The North
© William Morris
O muse that swayest the sad Northern Song,
Thy right hand full of smiting & of wrong,
Sinners, Turn, Why Will Ye Die?
© Charles Wesley
Sinners, turn, why will ye die?
God, your Maker, asks you why?
The Two Highwaymen
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
I LONG have had a quarrel set with Time
Because he robb'd me. Every day of life
GOLIAH'S Defeat. In the Manner of Lucan.
© Mather Byles
When the proud Philistines for War declar'd,
And Israel's Sons for Battle had prepar'd,
A Story At Dusk
© Ada Cambridge
An evening all aglow with summer light
And autumn colour-fairest of the year.
Wants
© Philip Larkin
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff -
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Goldilocks And Goldilocks
© William Morris
It was Goldilocks woke up in the morn
At the first of the shearing of the corn.
