Life poems
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Time And Death And Love
© Madison Julius Cawein
Last night I watched for Death--
So sick of life was I!--
When in the street beneath
I heard his watchman cry
The hour, while passing by.
Genesis BK IV
© Caedmon
(ll. 192-195) Then the Gracious King, Lord of all human kind,
blessed these two, male and female, man and wife, and spake this
word:
Aurora Leigh: Book Seventh
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I broke on Marian there. "Yet she herself,
A wife, I think, had scandals of her own,-
A lover not her husband."
The Origin Of Flattery
© Charlotte Turner Smith
WHEN Jove, in anger to the sons of the earth,
Bid artful Vulcan give Pandora birth,
And sent the fatal gift which spread below
O'er all the wretched race contagious woe,
Recollections Of A Dreamland
© James Clerk Maxwell
Rouse ye! torpid daylight-dreamers, cast your carking cares away!
As calm air to troubled water, so my night is to your day;
All the dreary day you labour, groping after common sense,
And your eyes ye will not open on the night's magnificence.
Ye would scow were I to tell you how a guiding radiance gleams
On the outer world of action from my inner world of dreams.
The Pleasures of Memory - Part II.
© Samuel Rogers
Sweet Memory, wafted by thy gentle gale,
Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail,
To view the fairy-haunts of long-lost hours.
Blest with far greener shades, far fresher flowers.
Ode on the Poetical Character
© William Taylor Collins
As once, if not with light regard,
I read aright that gifted bard,
Tannhauser
© Emma Lazarus
Far into Wartburg, through all Italy,
In every town the Pope sent messengers,
Riding in furious haste; among them, one
Who bore a branch of dry wood burst in bloom;
The pastoral rod had borne green shoots of spring,
And leaf and blossom. God is merciful.
Song of the Glee-Maiden
© Sir Walter Scott
Yes, thou mayst sigh,
And look once more at all around,
At stream and bank, and sky and ground.
Thy life its final course has found,
And thou must die.
Perfect Love
© Archibald Lampman
For perfect love is like a fair green plant,
That fades not with its blossoms, but lives on,
And gentle lovers shall not come to want,
Though fancy with its first mad dream be gone;
Sweet is the flower, whose radiant glory flies,
But sweeter still the green that never dies.
You Make The Sunshine Of My Heart
© Mathilde Blind
You make the sunshine of my heart
And its tempestuous shower;
New-Englands Crisis
© Benjamin Tompson
IN seventy five the Critick of our years
Commenc'd our war with Phillip and his peers.
Burns
© John Greenleaf Whittier
No more these simple flowers belong
To Scottish maid and lover;
Sown in the common soil of song,
They bloom the wide world over.
The Ghost - Book III
© Charles Churchill
It was the hour, when housewife Morn
With pearl and linen hangs each thorn;
Chanukah Lights Tonight by Steven Schneider: American Life in Poetry #140 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laur
© Ted Kooser
The candles flicker in the window.
Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows.
If you squint,
the neighbors' Christmas lights
look like the Omaha skyline.
A Dream Of Venice
© Ada Cambridge
Numb, half asleep, and dazed with whirl of wheels,
And gasp of steam, and measured clank of chains,
Marmion: Introduction to Canto II.
© Sir Walter Scott
But chief 'twere sweet to think such life
(Though but escape from fortune's strife),
Something most matchless good and wise,
A great and grateful sacrifice;
And deem each hour to musing given
A step upon the road to heaven.
There Was A Rose
© Madison Julius Cawein
There was a rose in Eden once: it grows
On Earth now, sweeter for its rare perfume:
Old Woman With Protea Flowers, Kahalui Airport by Kathleen Flenniken: American Life in Poetry #134 T
© Ted Kooser
When ancient people gathered around the fire at nightfall, I like to think that they told stories, about where each of them had been that day, and what that person had seen in the forest. Those were among our first stories, and we still venture into the world and return to tell others what happened. It's part of community. Here Kathleen Flenniken of Washington tells us about a woman she saw at an airport.
Old Woman With Protea Flowers, Kahalui Airport
