Life poems
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The Graveyard By The Sea
© Paul Valéry
Sure treasure, simple shrine to intelligence,
Palpable calm, visible reticence,
Proud-lidded water, Eye wherein there wells
Under a film of fire such depth of sleep --
O silence! . . . Mansion in my soul, you slope
Of gold, roof of a myriad golden tiles.
Poetic Emotion.
© Robert Crawford
The heart's throb makes the music: words are air,
A mortal breath, if no emotion thrills
The subtle syllables; and all men own
The poesy, the passion, and the power
Alberto by Warren Woessner: American Life in Poetry #118 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Our species has developed monstrous weapons that can kill not only all of us but everything else on the planet, yet when the wind rises we run for cover, as we have done for as long as we've been on this earth. Here's hoping we never have the skill or arrogance to conquer the weather. And weather stories? We tell them in the same way our ancestors related encounters with fearsome dragons. This poem by Minnesota poet Warren Woessner honors the tradition by sharing an experience with a hurricane.
Hymn XXI: Ye Simple Souls That Stray
© Charles Wesley
Ye simple souls that stray
Far from the path of peace,
At Queensferry
© William Ernest Henley
The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean
We bowled along a road that curved a spine
The Miserere
© Harriet Beecher Stowe
Not of the earth that music! all things fade;
Vanish the pictured walls! and, one by one,
The starry candles silently expire!
Cathair Fhargus
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
(FERGUS'S SEAT.)
A mountain in the Island of Arran, the summit of which resembles a gigantic
human profile.
Visitation And Communion Of The Sick
© John Keble
O Youth and Joy, your airy tread
Too lightly springs by Sorrow's bed,
To The Heroic Soul
© Duncan Campbell Scott
And when Grief comes thou shalt have suffered more
Than all the deepest woes of all the world;
Joy, dancing in, shall find thee nourished with mirth;
Wisdom shall find her Master at thy door;
And Love shall find thee crowned with love empearled;
And death shall touch thee not but a new birth.
Hero And Leander. The Sixth Sestiad
© George Chapman
No longer could the Day nor Destinies
Delay the Night, who now did frowning rise
Speculum Tuscanismi
© Gabriel Harvey
Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
Hermann And Dorothea - II. Terpsichore
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Then the son thoughtfully answer'd:--"I know not why, but the fact is
My annoyance has graven itself in my mind, and hereafter
I could not bear at the piano to see her, or list to her singing."
'The Aeneid of Virgil: Book 3
© Publius Vergilius Maro
WHEN Heavn had overturnd the Trojan state
And Priams throne, by too severe a fate;
Sonnet LXXIX. To The Goddess Of Botany
© Charlotte Turner Smith
OF Folly weary, shrinking from the view
Of Violence and Fraud, allow'd to take
All peace from humble life; I would forsake
Their haunts for ever, and, sweet Nymph! with you
For An Autograph
© James Russell Lowell
THOUGH old the thought and oft exprest,
'Tis his at last who says it best,
I'll try my fortune with the rest.
Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.
The Brothers
© William Wordsworth
"THESE Tourists, heaven preserve us! needs must live
A profitable life: some glance along,
