Death poems
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Her Eyes
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Up from the street and the crowds that went,
Morning and midnight, to and fro,
Still was the room where his days he spent,
And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow.
Ballad of Dead Friends
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.
Octaves
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
I We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel --
The Deserted Village
© Oliver Goldsmith
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.
An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog
© Oliver Goldsmith
Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.
Silent Letters
© Charles Webb
Treacherous as trap door spiders,
they ambush children's innocence.
"Why is there g h in light? It isn't fair!"
Buddha declared the world illusory
Reservations Confirmed
© Charles Webb
The ticket settles on my desk: a paper tongue
pronouncing "Go away;" a flattened seed
from which a thousand-mile leap through the air can grow.
Bearhug
© Michael Ondaatje
Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.
To A Sad Daughter
© Michael Ondaatje
One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.
The IX Ode to Horace
© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.
While I was pleasing to your arms,
Nor any youth, of happier charms,
Thy snowy bosom blissful prest,
Not Portia's like me was blest.
The Procession
© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.
The legislators pass along
A solemn, self-important throng!
Just raised from the common mass,
They feel themselves another class.
--But let them in the sunshine play
For every dog must have his day.
To My Little Niece Sally Livingston
© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.
To my little niece Sally Livingston, on the death of a little serenading wren she admired.
Hasty pilgrim stop thy pace
Turn a moment to this place
Read what pity hath erected
An Elegy on the Death of Montgomery Tappen
© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.
The sweetest, gentlest, of the youthful train,
Here lies his clay cold upon the sable bier!
He scarce had started on life's varied plain,
For dreary death arrested his career.
The Idea of Ancestry
© Etheridge Knight
I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins.I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).
Feeling Fucked Up
© Etheridge Knight
Lord she's gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
The Highwayman
© Alfred Noyes
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inndoor.
The Geate a-Vallen to
© Ingeborg Bachmann
In the zunsheen of our zummers
Wi the hay time now a-come,
How busy wer we out a-vield
Wi vew a-left at hwome,
The Girt Woak Tree
© Ingeborg Bachmann
The girt woak tree that's in the dell !
There's noo tree I do love so well;
Vor times an' times when I wer young
I there've a-climb'd, an' there've a-zwung,
The Young that Died in Beauty
© Ingeborg Bachmann
If souls should only sheen so bright
In heaven as in ethly light,
An nothen better wer the cease,
How comely still, in sheape an feace,
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
© John Ashbery
As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
