Death poems
/ page 463 of 560 /
Dead mans clothes
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Growing up, I propose,
is like wearing a dead mans clothes.
Death has a way of levelling the ground.
I have found the closer your relationship
The New Year
© George MacDonald
Be welcome, year! with corn and sickle come;
Make poor the body, but make rich the heart:
What man that bears his sheaves, gold-nodding, home,
Will heed the paint rubbed from his groaning cart!
Faustus And Helen
© Arthur Symons
HELEN
Have I slept long? You waken me from sleep.
I have forgotten something: what is it?
To A Picture Of Eleanor Duse
© Sara Teasdale
Was ever any face like this before
So light a veiling for the soul within,
So pure and yet so pitiful for sin?
They say the soul will pass the Heavy Door,
And you will claim
© Ivan Donn Carswell
And you will claim we need more births to keep
our population mix in check while natures truths
suggest there are too many of us yet?
And you will make the claim with good intent,
Death
© George Herbert
Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
Nothing but bones,
The sad effect of sadder grones:
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.
The Morning Watch
© Jones Very
'Tis near the morning watch, the dim lamp burns
But scarcely shows how dark the slumbering street;
Warble Of Lilac-Time
© Walt Whitman
My mind henceforth, and all its meditations-my recitatives,
My land, my age, my race, for once to serve in songs,
(Sprouts, tokens ever of death indeed the same as life,)
To grace the bush I love-to sing with the birds,
A warble for joy of Lilac-time.
A True Hero
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
JAMES BRAIDWOOD: Died June 22, 1861.
NOT at the battle front,--writ of in story;
Not on the blazing wreck steering to glory;
Not while in martyr-pangs soul and flesh sever,
An excerpt from "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus"
© Denise Levertov
iiGloriaPraise the wet snow
falling early.
Praise the shadow
my neighor's chimney casts on the tile roof
A Fuedal Picture
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
WITH what a grace she passed us by just now!
Her delicate chin half raised, her cordial brow
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
© Denise Levertov
Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
Electra On Azalea Path
© Sylvia Plath
The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
The Liberator
© Emily Holmes Coleman
Keys turning
rattling in the loose locks
opening high the doors
that close again
like death-hours coming faster
To Caroline: Oh When Shall The Grave Hide
© George Gordon Byron
Oh when shall the grave hide for ever my sorrow?
Oh when shall my soul wing her flight from this clay?
The present is hell, and the coming to-morrow
But brings, with new torture, the curse of to-day.
The Dark Soul
© Arthur Alexander Banning
The dark soul goes lonely, it seeks, but cannot find
its heart's desire among the whirling
planets of the mind.
The Borough. Letter XVIII: The Poor And Their
© George Crabbe
applause:
To her own house is borne the week's supply;
There she in credit lives, there hopes in peace to
Seeing For A Moment
© Denise Levertov
I thought, now is the time to step
into the fire
it was deep water.
San Borondon
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
Saint Brandan, a Scotch abbot, long ago
Sailed southward with a swarm of monks, to sow
The seeds of true religion nothing else
Among the tribes of naked infidels.
The Bastille: A Vision
© Helen Maria Williams
"Drear cell! along whose lonely bounds,
Unvisited by light,
Chill silence dwells with night,
Save where the clanging fetter sounds!
