Death poems
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General William Booth Enters into Heaven
© Vachel Lindsay
Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod,
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.
Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief
Eagle countenance in sharp relief,
Beard a-flying, air of high command
Unabated in that holy land.
The Longest Day
© George Meredith
On yonder hills soft twilight dwells
And Hesper burns where sunset dies,
The Ideal
© Charles Harpur
Spirit of Dreams! When many a toilsome height
Shut paradise from exiled Adams sight,
The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son
© Vachel Lindsay
THE North Star whispers: "You are one
Of those whose course no chance can change.
You blunder, but are not undone,
Your spirit-task is fixed and strange.
To Lady Jane
© Vachel Lindsay
Romance was always young.
You come today
Just eight years old
With marvellous dark hair.
Rondel of Merciless Beauty
© Geoffrey Chaucer
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.
Genesis
© Vachel Lindsay
O Eve with the fire-lit breast
And child-face red and white!
I heaped the great logs high!
That was our bridal night.
The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race
© Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERYFat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
A deep rolling bass.
Hymn To Colour
© George Meredith
With Life and Death I walked when Love appeared,
And made them on each side a shadow seem.
Through wooded vales the land of dawn we neared,
Where down smooth rapids whirls the helmless dream
To fall on daylight; and night puts away
Her darker veil for grey.
Death and Birth
© George MacDonald
Welcome, friend! Bring in your bricks.
Mortar there? No need to mix?
That is well. And picks and hammers?
Verily these are no shammers!-
There, my friend, build up that niche,
That one with the painting rich!
Riches
© Sara Teasdale
I have no riches but my thoughts,
Yet these are wealth enough for me;
My thoughts of you are golden coins
Stamped in the mint of memory;
The Rose of Midnight
© Vachel Lindsay
THE moon is now an opening flower,
The sky a cliff of blue.
The moon is now a silver rose;
Her pollen is the dew.
With Scindia to Delphi
© Rudyard Kipling
More than a hundred years ago, in a great battle fought near Delhi,
an Indian Prince rode fifty miles after the day was lost
with a beggar-girl, who had loved him and followed him in all his camps,
on his saddle-bow. He lost the girl when almost within sight of safety.
Wilful Missing
© Rudyard Kipling
(Deserters)
There is a world outside the one you know,
To which for curiousness 'Ell can't compare--
It is the place where "wilful-missings" go,
As we can testify, for we are there.
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
The First Part: Sonnet 11 - Lamp of heaven's crystal hall that brings the hours,
© William Henry Drummond
Lamp of heaven's crystal hall that brings the hours,
Eye-dazzler, who makes the ugly night
The Trade
© Rudyard Kipling
They bear, in place of classic names,
Letters and numbers on their skin.
They play their grisly blindfold games
In little boxes made of tin.
