Happiness poems
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A Study In Feeling
© Ellis Parker Butler
To be a great musician you must be a man of moods,
You have to be, to understand sonatas and etudes.
To execute pianos and to fiddle with success,
With sympathy and feeling you must fairly effervesce;
It was so with Paganini, Remenzi and Cho-pang,
And so it was with Peterkin Von Gabriel OLang.
For Osip Mandelstam
© Anna Akhmatova
And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
Lying in me
© Anna Akhmatova
I know the gods changed people into things,
Leaving their consciousness alive and free.
To keep alive the wonder of suffering,
You have been metamorphosed into me.
Mutual Forbearance : Necessary to the Happiness of the Married State
© William Cowper
The lady thus address'd her spouse--
What a mere dungeon is this house!
The Joy of Incompleteness
© Anonymous
If all our life were one broad glare
Of sunlight, clear, unclouded;
If all our path were smooth and fair,
By no soft gloom enshrouded;
Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace
© Lawrence Ferlinghetti
One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
The Happy Husband
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Oft, oft, methinks, the while with thee
I breathe, as from the heart, thy dear
And dedicated bame, I hear
A promise and a mystery,
A pledge of more than passing life,
Yea, in that very name of wife!
On The Death Of J. C. An Infant
© Phillis Wheatley
NO more the flow'ry scenes of pleasure rife,
Nor charming prospects greet the mental eyes,
No more with joy we view that lovely face
Smiling, disportive, flush'd with ev'ry grace.
The Old Times Were the Best
© James Whitcomb Riley
All about is bright and pleasant
With the sound of song and jest,
Yet a feeling's ever present
That the Old Times were the best.
Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
(The Dry Salvagespresumably les trois sauvagesis a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
The Garden Shukkei-en
© Carolyn Forche
It is the river she most
remembers, the living
and the dead both crying for help.
The Song Of The Widow
© Rainer Maria Rilke
That was not his fault nor mine
since both of us had nothing but patience;
but death has none.
I saw him coming (how rotten he looked),
and I watched him as he took and took:
and nothing was mine.
Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Yet the dead youth must go on alone.
In silence the elder Lament brings him
as far as the gorge where it shimmers in the moonlight:
The Foutainhead of Joy. With reverance she names it,
saying: "In the world of mankind it is a life-bearing stream."
from The Tenth Elegy
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Ah, but the City of Pain: how strange its streets are:
the false silence of sound drowning sound,
and there--proud, brazen, effluence from the mold of emptiness--
the gilded hubbub, the bursting monument.
Even Because
© Ralph Angel
not dead but deeper, wrapped up in curtains, a different color,
among the railings and the pigeons, the rooftops and
walls
it may not always be so
© Edward Estlin Cummings
if this should be,i say if this should be-
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him,and take his hands,
saying,Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.
The Death of Nicou
© Thomas Chatterton
On Tiber's banks, Tiber, whose waters glide
In slow meanders down to Gaigra's side;
And circling all the horrid mountain round,
Rushes impetuous to the deep profound;
Song of the Exposition.
© Walt Whitman
1
AFTER all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free;
Mediums.
© Walt Whitman
THEY shall arise in the States,
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness;
They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos;
They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive;
Respondez!
© Walt Whitman
RESPONDEZ! Respondez!
(The war is completedthe price is paidthe title is settled beyond recall;)
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?
