Life poems
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One Hundred and Three
© Henry Lawson
They shut a man in the four-by-eight, with a six-inch slit for air,
Twenty-three hours of the twenty-four, to brood on his virtues there.
And the dead stone walls and the iron door close in as an iron band
On eyes that followed the distant haze far out on the level land.
Cora
© Charles Harpur
The spring it came, with never a storm,
And nine times came and went,
Till its whole spirit with her form
In budding beauty blent.
Dreams
© Emma Lazarus
A DREAM of lilies: all the blooming earth,
A garden full of fairies and of flowers;
Its only music the glad cry of mirth,
While the warm sun weaves golden-tissued hours;
Elegy, Written In The Year 1758
© James Beattie
Still, shall unthinking man substantial deem
The forms that fleet through life's deceitful dream?
On clouds, where Fancy's beam amusive plays,
Shall heedless Hope the towering fabric raise?
Living Without God In The World
© Charles Lamb
Mystery of God! thou brave & beauteous world!
Made fair with light, & shade, & stars, & flowers;
Quis Separabit?
© Philip Joseph Holdsworth
All my life's short years had been stern and sterile -
I stood like one whom the blasts blow back -
As with shipmen whirled through the straits of Peril,
So fierce foes menaced my every track.
In The Harbour: Autumn Within
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is autumn; not without
But within me is the cold.
Youth and spring are all about;
It is I that have grown old.
Lochiel's Warning
© Thomas Campbell
Lochiel. - Go, preach to the coward, thou death-telling seer!
Or, if gory Culloden so dreadful appear,
Draw, dotard, around thy old wavering sight!
This mantle, to cover the phantoms of fright.
In Praise Of Johnny Applseed
© Vachel Lindsay
But he left their wigwams and their love.
By the hour of dawn he was proud and stark,
Kissed the Indian babes with a sigh,
Went forth to live on roots and bark,
Sleep in the trees, while the years howled by--
New Morality
© George Canning
But say,-indignant does the Muse retire,
Her shrine deserted, and extinct its fire?
No pious hand to feed the sacred flame,
No raptured soul a Poet's charge to claim.
Music's Duel
© Richard Crashaw
Now westward Sol had spent the richest beams
Of noon's high glory, when, hard by the streams
Sierra Madre
© Henry Van Dyke
O mother mountains! billowing far to the snowlands,
Robed in aërial amethyst, silver, and blue,
Why do ye look so proudly down on the lowlands?
What have their groves and gardens to do with you?
Life's Uncertain Day
© Thomas Love Peacock
The briefest part of life's uncertain day,
Youth's lovely blossom, hastes to swift decay:
While love, wine, song, enhance our gayest mood
Old age creeps on, nor thought, nor understood.
Midsummer Vigil
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Night smiles on me with her stars,
Mystic, pure, enchanted, lone.
Light, that only heaven discloses,
Is in heaven that no cloud mars;
Here, through murmuring darkness blown,
Comes the scent of unseen roses.
A Pagan Prayer
© Virna Sheard
Lord of all Life! When my hours are done,
Take me and make me anew--
And give me back to the earth and the sun,
And the sky's unlimited blue.
Elegy XIX. - Written in Spring, 1743
© William Shenstone
Again the labouring hind inverts the soil;
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave;
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
And finds me vacant in the rural cave.
Thoughts on Imputed Righteousness - Occasioned by Reading Theron and Aspasio : Part II.
© John Byrom
To shun much novel sentiment and nice,
I take the thing from its apparent rise;
A Love By The Sea
© William Ernest Henley
Out of the starless night that covers me,
(O tribulation of the wind that rolls!)
Black as the cloud of some tremendous spell,
The susurration of the sighing sea
Sounds like the sobbing whisper of two souls
That tremble in a passion of farewell.
Maternal Grief
© William Wordsworth
DEPARTED Child! I could forget thee once
Though at my bosom nursed; this woeful gain
Thy dissolution brings, that in my soul
Is present and perpetually abides
