Death poems
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For The Anniversary Of John Keats' Death
© Sara Teasdale
At midnight, when the moonlit cypress trees
Have woven round his grave a magic shade,
Still weeping the unfinished hymn he made,
There moves fresh Maia, like a morning breeze
The Neophyte
© Aleister Crowley
To-night I tread the unsubstantial way
That looms before me, as the thundering night
Falls on the ocean: I must stop, and pray
One little prayer, and then - what bitter fight
Rembrandts
© Madison Julius Cawein
I shall not soon forget her and her eyes,
The haunts of hate, where suffering seemed to write
Its own dark name, whose syllables are sighs,
In strange and starless night.
The Hawk and the Babe
© Aleister Crowley
I am that hawk of gold
Proud in adamantine poise
On the pillars of torqoise,
See,beyond the starry fold,
Where a darkling orb is rolled.
The Garden of Janus
© Aleister Crowley
IThe cloud my bed is tinged with blood and foam.
The vault yet blazes with the sun
Writhing above the West, brave hippodrome
Whose gladiators shock and shun
Thanatos Basileos
© Aleister Crowley
The serpent dips his head beneath the sea
His mother, source of all his energy
Eternal, thence to draw the strength he needs
On earth to do indomitable dees
No Children, No Pets by Sue Ellen Thompson: American Life in Poetry #89 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson of Connecticut shows us how to mourn inevitable changes, tuck the memories away, then go on to see the possibility of a new and promising chapter in one's life.
A New Pilgrimage: Sonnet XIX
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Alas, that words like these should be but folly!
Behold, the Boulevard mocks, and I mock too.
Let us away and purge our melancholy
With the last laughter at the Ambigu!
Long Odds
© Aleister Crowley
How many million galaxies there are
Who knows? and each has countless stars in it,
And each rolls through eternities afar
Beneath the threshold of the Infinite.
Logos
© Aleister Crowley
Out of the night forth flamed a star -mine own!
Now seventy light-years nearer as I urge
Constant my heart through the abyss unknown,
Its glory my sole guide while space surge
Independence
© Aleister Crowley
Come to my arms --- is it eve? is it morn?
Is Apollo awake? Is Diana reborn?
Are the streams in full song? Do the woods whisper hush
Is it the nightingale? Is it the thrush?
Hymn to Pan
© Aleister Crowley
Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man ! My man !
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan ! Io Pan .
Hymn to Lucifer
© Aleister Crowley
Ware, nor of good nor ill, what aim hath act?
Without its climax, death, what savour hath
Life? an impeccable machine, exact
He paces an inane and pointless path
Exile From God
© John Hall Wheelock
I do not fear to lay my body down
In death, to share
The life of the dark earth and lose my own,
If God is there.
Colophon
© Aleister Crowley
TO LAYLAH EIGHT-AND-TWENTYLamp of living loveliness,
Maid miraculously male,
Rapture of thine own excess
Blushing through the velvet veil
Boo to Buddha
© Aleister Crowley
So it is eighteen years,
Helena, since we met!
A season so endears,
Nor you nor I forget
The fresh young faces that once clove
In that most fiery dawn of love.
Athor and Asar
© Aleister Crowley
[Dedicated to Frank Harris, editor of Vanity Fair]On the black night, beneath the winter moon,
I clothed me in the limbs of Codia,
Swooning my soul out into her red throat,
So that the glimmer of our skins, the tune
Hypocrite Auteur
© Archibald MacLeish
mon semblable, mon frère
(1)
Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction
In that perspective of the action
Which pictures us inhabiting the end
Of everything with death for only friend.
The Borough. Letter XII: Players
© George Crabbe
DRAWN by the annual call, we now behold
Our Troop Dramatic, heroes known of old,
And those, since last they march'd, enlisted and
At Bordj-an-Nus
© Aleister Crowley
El Arabi! El Arabi! Burn in thy brilliance, mine own!
O Beautiful! O Barbarous! Seductive as a serpent is
That poises head and hood, and makes his body tremble to the drone
Of tom-tom and of cymbal wooed by love's assassin sorceries!
