Life poems
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Joy
© Emile Verhaeren
O splendid, spacious day, irradiate
With flaming dawns, when earth shows yet more fair
Her ardent beauty, proud, without alloy;
And wakening life breathes out her perfume rare
So potently, that, all intoxicate,
Our ravished being rushes upon joy!
Arachne
© Rose Terry Cooke
I watch her in the corner there,
As, restless, bold, and unafraid,
She slips and floats along the air
Till all her subtile house is made.
A Wall
© Robert Browning
O the old wall here! How I could pass
Life in a long midsummer day,
My feet confined to a plot of grass,
My eyes from a wall not once away!
The Nightingale and Glow-worm
© William Cowper
Those Christians best deserve the name,
Who studiously make peace their aim;
Peace, both the duty and the prize
Of him that creeps and him that flies.
On The 100th Anniversary Of Anna Akhmatova
© Joseph Brodsky
The fire and the page, the hewed hairs and the swords,
The grains and the millstone, the whispers and the clatter --
God saves all that -- especially the words
Of love and pity, as His only way to utter.
Sonnet II
© Mikolaj Sep Szarzynski
In shame is man conceived, through pain is born,
And brief the time upon this earth he goes
In life inconstant, full of fears and woes.
He dies, a shadow by the sun forlorn.
After The Rain [for W. D. Snodgrass]
© Anthony Evan Hecht
The barbed-wire fences rust
As their cedar uprights blacken
Cautionary Tales by Mark Vinz : American Life in Poetry #229 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
For over forty years, Mark Vinz, of Moorhead, Minnesota-poet, teacher, publisher-has been a prominent advocate for the literature of the Upper Great Plains. Here’s a recent poem that speaks to growing older.
Cautionary Tales
Beyond the field of grazing, gazing cows
The Valse
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
When to sweet music my lady is dancing
My heart to mild frenzy her beauty inspires.
Keep Me Fully Glad
© Rabindranath Tagore
II
Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand.
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing.
I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast.
Make my life glad with nothing.
The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.
You'll Tell Her, Won't You?
© Anonymous
You'll tell her, won't you? Say to her I died
As a brave soldier should - true to the last;
Prayer For His Ladys Life
© Ezra Pound
FROM PROPERTIUS, ELEGIAE, LIB. III, 26
Here let thy clemency, Persephone, hold firm,
Do thou, Pluto, bring here no greater harshness.
So many thousand beauties are gone down to Avernus,
Ye might let one remain above with us.
Starlings On The Roof
© Thomas Hardy
'No smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,
The people who lived here have left the spot,
And others are coming who knew them not.
Our Little Needs
© Edgar Albert Guest
A LITTLE more of loving, a little less of pain,
A little more of sunshine, a little less of rain;
A little more of friendship, a little less of strife
These are what we 're wanting to make the perfect life.
Horace I, 4.
© Eugene Field
'Tis spring! the boats bound to the sea;
The breezes, loitering kindly over
The fields, again bring herds and men
The grateful cheer of honeyed clover.
Behind The Arras
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
As in some dim baronial hall restrained,
A prisoner sits, engirt by secret doors
For The Same Book ( To Louisa C, For Her Album)
© John Kenyon
With all its best of sense and wit
Each Album's earlier leaves are writ;
No pagebut Love and Friendship on it
Shower dainty prose and perfumed sonnet;
While not one troubling thought comes nigh
Of future dearth and vacancy.
May
© Hilaire Belloc
How often, bosomed in the breathing strong
Of mosses and young flowerets, have I lain
And watched the clouds, and caught the sheltered song -
Which it were more than life to hear again -
Of those small birds that pipe it all day long
Not far from Marly by the memoried Seine.
Consider The Ravens
© George MacDonald
But I consider further, and find
A hungry bird has a free mind;
He is hungry to-day, not to-morrow,
Steals no comfort, no grief doth borrow;
This moment is his, thy will hath said it,
The next is nothing till thou hast made it.
