Death poems
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A Night Attack
© Leon Gellert
Be still. The bleeding night is in suspense
Of watchful agony and coloured thought,
Dreaming Of Li Bai (2)
© Du Fu
One thousand autumns, ten thousand years of fame,
are nothing after death.
'The Aeneid of Virgil: Book 6
© Publius Vergilius Maro
HE said, and wept; then spread his sails before
The winds, and reachd at length the Cumæan shore:
The Little Old Woman
© Katharine Tynan
There's a Little Old Woman walks in the night,
Singing her love song like a falling keen;
The Little Old Woman is the heart's delight,
With the gold crown under her hood to tell her queen.
In The Harbour: Decoration Day
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this Field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry's shot alarms!
The Triumph Of Fashion
© Henry James Pye
She spoke, and while her voice the war defy'd,
Assembling myriads croud on every side;
Undaunted to the field of death they go,
And frown amazement on the approaching foe:
With dreadful shock the encount'ring armies meet,
And the plain trembling, rocks beneath their feet.
Buckdancers Choice
© James Dickey
So I would hear out those lungs,
The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler
Through Liberty To Light
© Alfred Austin
Fixed is my Faith, the lingering dawn despite,
That still we move through Liberty to Light.
The Human Tragedy.
Youth and Age
© Vance Palmer
Youth that rides the wildest horse,
Youth that throws the deadliest steer,
To A Jilted Lover
© Sylvia Plath
Cold on my narrow cot I lie
and in sorrow look
through my window-square of black:
The Wind of Death
© Ethelwyn Wetherald
The wind of death, that softly blows
The last warm petal from the rose,
What Rabbi Jehosha Said
© James Russell Lowell
Rabbi Jehosha had the skill
To know that Heaven is in God's will;
And doing that, though for a space
One heart-beat long, may win a grace
As full of grandeur and of glow
As Princes of the Chariot know.
For The Commemoration Services
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
FOUR summers coined their golden light in leaves,
Four wasteful autumns flung them to the gale,
Four winters wore the shroud the tempest weaves,
The fourth wan April weeps o'er hill and vale;
Breton Afternoon
© Ernest Christopher Dowson
Here, where the breath of the scented-gorse floats through the
sun-stained air,
On a steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours long
and heard
Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer,
And the river ripple by and the distant call of a bird.
Sonnet 7: When Nature
© Sir Philip Sidney
When Nature made her chief work, Stella's eyes,
In color black why wrapp'd she beams so bright?
Would she in beamy black, like painter wise,
Frame daintiest lustre, mix'd of shades and light?
Stings
© Sylvia Plath
Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I
The Slave Dealer
© Thomas Pringle
From ocean's wave a Wanderer came,
With visage tanned and dun:
His Mother, when he told his name,
Scarce knew her long-lost son;
So altered was his face and frame
By the ill course he had run.
