Life poems
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After Death
© Edith Nesbit
IF we must part, this parting is the best:
How would you bear to lay
Your head on some warm pillow far away--
Your head, so used to lying on my breast?
The Love Sonnets Of Proteus. Part III: Gods And False Gods: LXXII
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
FROM THE FRENCH OF ANVERS
My heart has its secret, my soul its mystery,
A love which is eternal begotten in a day.
The ill is long past healing. Why should I speak to--day?
The Pessimist
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
You that have snarled through the ages, take your answer and go--
I know your hoary question, the riddle that all men know.
You have weighed the stars in a balance, and grasped the skies in a span:
Take, if you must have answer, the word of a common man.
From the Persian of Hafiz II
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of Paradise, O hermit wise,
Let us renounce the thought.
Of old therein our names of sin
Allah recorded not.
Salomes Lament
© Arthur Symons
Why did I have thee slain? Herodias' desire,
John; yea, I loved thee! They made me at the feast
Graves Of Infants
© John Clare
Infant' graves are steps of angels, where
Earth's brightest gems of innocence repose.
The Song Of Hiawatha I: The Peace-Pipe
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
A Wild Iris
© Madison Julius Cawein
That day we wandered 'mid the hills,--so lone
Clouds are not lonelier,--the forest lay
In emerald darkness 'round us. Many a stone
And gnarly root, gray-mossed, made wild our way;
And many a bird the glimmering light along
Showered the golden bubbles of its song.
The Song Of Hiawatha VII: Hiawatha's Sailing
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Give me of your bark, O Birch-tree!
Of your yellow bark, O Birch-tree!
Santa Paula by Lee McCarthy: American Life in Poetry #148 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
I've written about the pleasures of poetry that offers us vivid scenes but which lets us draw our own conclusions about the implications of what we're being shown. The poet can steer us a little by the selection of details, but a lot of the effect of the poem is in what is not said, in what we deduce. Lee McCarthy is a California poet, and here is something seen from across the street, something quite ordinary yet packed with life.
Magna Est Veritas [great is the truth]
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
The Prodigal
© Peter McArthur
LAST night the boy came back to me again,
The laughing boy, all-credulous of good
A Book Of Strife In The Form Of The Diary Of An Old Soul - January
© George MacDonald
1.
LORD, what I once had done with youthful might,
Sonnets of the Empire: Australia to England
© Archibald Thomas Strong
By all the deeds to Thy dear glory done,
By all the life blood spilt to serve Thy need,
The Last Word
© Sir Henry Newbolt
Before the April night was late
A rider came to the castle gate;
A rider breathing human breath,
But the words he spoke were the words of Death.
The Story Of Glaucus The Thessalian
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Up to the deep founts of the tenderest eyes
That e'er have shone, I think, since in some dell
Of Argos and enchanted Thessaly,
The poet, from whose heart-lit brain it came,
Murmured this record unto her he loved?
Recollection of the Arabian Nights
© Alfred Tennyson
WHEN the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
Il Cinque Maggio (English)
© Alessandro Manzoni
HE was -- As motionless as lay,
First mingled with the dead,
The Abencerrage : Canto I.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Lonely and still are now thy marble halls,
Thou fair Alhambra! there the feast is o'er;
And with the murmur of thy fountain-falls,
Blend the wild tones of minstrelsy no more.
