Death poems
/ page 510 of 560 /
Two Sonnets In Memory
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
(Nicola Sacco -- Bartolomeo Vanzetti)
Executed August 23, 1927
I
Interim
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
The room is full of you!As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!
Sonnet 01: Thou Art Not Lovelier Than Lilacs,No
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drinkand livewhat has destroyed some men.
Justice Denied In Massachusetts
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
The Death Of Autumn
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Sonnet (Women Have Loved Before As I Love Now)
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Women have loved before as I love now;
At least, in lively chronicles of the past
Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow
Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast
Elegy Before Death
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;
Ode To Silence
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Aye, but she?
Your other sister and my other soul
Grave Silence, lovelier
Than the three loveliest maidens, what of her?
Conscientious Objector
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.
Here Is A Wound That Never Will Heal, I Know
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Here is a wound that never will heal, I know,
Being wrought not of a dearness and a death,
But of a love turned ashes and the breath
Gone out of beauty; never again will grow
Renascence
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
Apostrophe To Man
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
(On reflecting that the world
is ready to go to war again)Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build
bombing airplanes;
Well, I Have Lost You
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Love Is Not All
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Prisoner, The - (A Fragment)
© Emily Jane Brontë
In the dungeon-crypts, idly did I stray,
Reckless of the lives wasting there away;
"Draw the ponderous bars! open, Warder stern!"
He dared not say me nay - the hinges harshly turn.
Self-Interrogation
© Emily Jane Brontë
The evening passes fast away,
'Tis almost time to rest;
What thoughts has left the vanished day,
What feelings, in thy breast?
Death
© Emily Jane Brontë
Death! that struck when I was most confiding
In my certain faith of joy to be -
Strike again, Time's withered branch dividing
From the fresh root of Eternity!
VERSES Occasioned by a Young Lady's asking the Author, What was a Cure for Love?
© Thomas Godfrey
In vain the sages turn their volumes o'er,
And on the musty page incessant pore,
Still mighty Love triumphant rules the heart,
Baffles their labour, and eludes their art.
The First Death. (extracts)
© Dimitris Lyacos
Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2000.VIIIFinal concept harbour which has
broken there where it crumpled our faces
there where ikons soaking and dissolving
scoured the rusty beds
