Happy poems
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The Young that Died in Beauty
© William Barnes
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,
Life Is A Dream - Act III
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
FIRST SOLDIER [within]. He is here within this tower.
Dash the door from off its hinges;
Enter all
Noonday Rest
© Mathilde Blind
THE willows whisper very, very low
Unto the listening breeze;
Sometimes they lose a leaf which, flickering slow,
Faints on the sunburnt leas.
Wingless Victory
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Worms feed upon the bodies of the brave
Who bled for us: but we bewildered see
Viler worms gnaw the things they died to save.
Old clouds of doubt and weariness oppress.
Happy the dead, we cry, not now to be
In the day of this dissolving littleness!
Forms Of Prayer To Be Used At Sea
© John Keble
The shower of moonlight falls as still and clear
Upon this desert main
I've Seen Again The One Child
© Paul Verlaine
I've seen again the One child: verily,
I felt the last wound open in my breast,
The last, whose perfect torture doth attest
That on some happy day I too shall die!
A Small Moment by Cornelius Eady: American Life in Poetry #197 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2
© Ted Kooser
I suspect that one thing some people have against reading poems is that they are so often so serious, so devoid of joy, as if we poets spend all our time brooding about mutability and death and never having any fun. Here Cornelius Eady, who lives and teaches in Indiana, offers us a poem of pure pleasure.
Ballad of Reading Gaol - I
© Oscar Wilde
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
Granny
© Ada Cambridge
Here, in her elbow chair, she sits
A soul alert, alive,
A poor old body shrunk and bent-
The queen-bee of the hive.
Farewell To The Muse
© George Gordon Byron
Thou Power! who hast ruled me through Infancy's days,
Young offspring of Fancy, 'tis time we should part;
Then rise on the gale this the last of my lays,
The coldest effusion which springs from my heart.
Childhood
© William Barnes
Aye, at that time our days wer but vew,
An' our lim's wer but small, an' a-growèn;
The Tie
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Coloured like Atlantic wave
To whose curve the bright air gave
Splendour, and the unfathomed blue
Mystery of nameless hue;
The Burial in the Snow
© Julia A Moore
The people of that party
Lay scattered all around,
Some were frightened, others laughed,
To think it happened so,
That the end of their sleigh ride
Was a burial in the snow.
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: A Satire
© George Gordon Byron
These are the themes that claim our plaudits now;
These are the bards to whom the muse must bow;
While Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot,
Resign their hallow'd bays to Walter Scott.
Selflove And Truth Incompatible
© William Cowper
From thorny wilds a monster came,
That filled my soul with fear and shame;
The Pauper's Christmas Carol
© Thomas Hood
Full of drink and full of meat,
On our SAVIOUR'S natal day,
CHARITY'S perennial treat;
Thus I heard a Pauper say:
Sonnet to Twilight
© Helen Maria Williams
Meek Twilight! soften the declining day,
And bring the hour my pensive spirit loves;
The Old Soldier
© Katharine Tynan
Lest the young soldiers be strange in heaven,
God bids the old soldier they all adored
Come to Him and wait for them, clean, new-shriven,
A happy doorkeeper in the House of the Lord.
I Saw Children Playing
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
No! they still are playing, chatting in a ring,
Eager voices seeking other games to know.
Lone I go protestinghear them laugh and sing,
Feeling not my absence, heeding not my woe.
