Life poems

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Deeds

© Archibald Lampman

'Tis well with words, oh masters, ye have sought,

To turn men's eyes yearning to the great and true,

Never, surely, was holier man
Than Ambrose, since the world began;
With diet spare and raiment thin
He shielded himself from the father of sin;
With bed of iron and scourgings oft,
His heart to God's hand as wax made soft.

A Phylactery

© John Hay

Wise men I hold those rakes of old
Who, as we read in antique story,
When lyres were struck and wine was poured,
Set the white Death's Head on the board--
Memento mori.

To ---, Written At Venice

© Richard Monckton Milnes

Not only through the golden haze
Of indistinct surprise,
With which the Ocean--bride displays
Her pomp to stranger eyes;--

Two Viewpoints

© Edgar Albert Guest

OUT in the open, the wide sky above,

And the green meadows stretched at my feet;

Christmas Night by Conrad Hilberry: American Life in Poetry #195 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004

© Ted Kooser

Here is a poem, much like a prayer, in which the Michigan poet Conrad Hilberry asks for no more than a little flare of light, an affirmation, at the end of a long, cold Christmas day. Christmas Night

Let midnight gather up the wind
and the cry of tires on bitter snow.
Let midnight call the cold dogs home,
sleet in their furâlast one can blow

An Ode To The King, At His Returning From Scotland To The Queen, After His Coronation There

© Sir Henry Wotton

Rouse up thy self, my gentle Muse,
Though now our green conceits be gray,
And yet once more do not refuse
To take thy Phrygian Harp, and play
In honour of this chearful Day.

Windows

© Charles Baudelaire

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window.
There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle.
What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane.
In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Summer Afternoon (Bodiam Castle, Sussex)

© Edith Wharton

And this was thine: to lose thyself in me,
Relive in my renewal, and become
The light of other lives, a quenchless torch
Passed on from hand to hand, till men are dust
And the last garland withers from my shrine.

Lament.

© Arthur Henry Adams

PEACE, your little child is dead:
Peace, I cannot weep with you;
I have no more tears to shed;
I have mourned my baby too

The Singing Of The Magnificat

© Edith Nesbit

IN midst of wide green pasture-lands, cut through
By lines of alders bordering deep-banked streams,
Where bulrushes and yellow iris grew,
And rest and peace, and all the flowers of dreams,
The Abbey stood--so still, it seemed a part
Of the marsh-country's almost pulseless heart.

A Lament For The Princes Of Tyrone And Tyrconnel

© James Clarence Mangan

O WOMAN of the piercing wail,

Who mournest oer yon mound of clay

A College Career

© Robert Fuller Murray

I
When one is young and eager,
A bejant and a boy,
Though his moustache be meagre,

The Prairie

© John Hay

The skies are blue above my head,

The prairie green below,

Elegy XXVI. Describing the Sorrow of An Ingeneous Mind

Why mourns my friend? why weeps his downcast eye,
That eye where mirth, where fancy, used to shine?
Thy cheerful meads reprove that swelling sigh;
Spring ne'er enamell'd fairer meads than thine.