Happiness poems
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The Circus
© Kenneth Koch
Noel Lee was in Paris then but usually out of it
In Germany or Denmark giving a concert
As part of an endless activity
Which was either his career or his happiness or a combination of both
Or neither I remember his dark eyes looking he was nervous
With me perhaps because of our days at Harvard.
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
To Delia
© William Cowper
Me to whatever state the gods assign,
Believe, my love, whatever state be mine,
Thread
© Jonathan Galassi
Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds
among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues,
The Bracelet of Grass
© William Vaughn Moody
The opal heart of afternoon
Was clouding on to throbs of storm,
The Garden Buddha by Peter Pereira: American Life in Poetry #132 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
Children at play give personalities to lifeless objects, and we don't need to give up that pleasure as we grow older. Poets are good at discerning life within what otherwise might seem lifeless. Here the poet Peter Pereira, a family physician in the Seattle area, contemplates a smiling statue, and in that moment of contemplation the smile is given by the statue to the man.
The Garden Buddha
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the distanceâalways
Song from The Indian Emperor
© John Dryden
Hark, hark, the waters fall, fall, fall,
And with a murmuring sound
Dash, dash upon the ground,
To gentle slumbers call.
Happiness (Reconsidered)
© Judith Viorst
Happiness
Is a clean bill of health from the doctor,
And the kids shouldn't move back home for
more than a year,
And not being audited, overdrawn, in Wilkes-Barre,
in a lawsuit or in traction.
Essay on Psychiatrists
© Robert Pinsky
It's crazy to think one could describe them—
Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears—
As though they were all alike any more
Stella's Birthday March 13, 1727
© Jonathan Swift
Although we now can form no more
Long schemes of life, as heretofore;
Yet you, while time is running fast,
Can look with joy on what is past.
from Omeros
© Derek Walcott
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
When Nightingales Their Lulling Song
© Bernard de Ventadorn
I know not when we meet again,
For grief hath rent my heart in twain:
For thee the royal court I fled,--
But guard me from the ills I dread,
And quick I'll join the bright array
Of courteous knights and ladies gay.
Address To The Sunset
© Robert Nichols
Exquisite stillness! What serenities
Of earth and air! How bright atop the wall
In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport
© Emma Lazarus
Here, where the noises of the busy town,
The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
And muse upon the consecrated spot.
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Modern Love: XXXIV
© George Meredith
Madam would speak with me. So, now it comes:
The Deluge or else Fire! She's well, she thanks
Hope, Like The Short-lived Ray That Gleams Awhile
© William Cowper
Hope, like the short-lived ray that gleams awhile
Through wintry skies, upon the frozen waste,
Cheers e'en the face of misery to a smile;
But soon the momentary pleasure's past.
The Times
© Charles Churchill
The time hath been, a boyish, blushing time,
When modesty was scarcely held a crime;
