Life poems
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AN ELEGY Upon the most victorious King of Sweden Gustavus Adolphus
© Henry King
---O Famâ ingens ingentior armis
Rex Gustave, quibus Clo te laudibus æquem?
Virgil. Æneid. lib. 2.
On The Death Of His Mother
© James Thomson
Ye fabled Muses, I your aid disclaim,
Your airy raptures, and your fancied flame;
April
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
The lovers that disbelieve,
False rumours shall grieve
And evil-speaking shall part.
The Dunciad: Book III.
© Alexander Pope
But in her Temple's last recess inclos'd,
On Dulness' lap th' Anointed head repos'd.
Sleep by Todd Davis: American Life in Poetry #136 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Here's a fine seasonal poem by Todd Davis, who lives and teaches in Pennsylvania. It's about the drowsiness that arrives with the early days of autumn. Can a bear imagine the future? Surely not as a human would, but perhaps it can sense that the world seems to be slowing toward slumber. Who knows?
Sleep
In The Winter
© George MacDonald
In the winter, flowers are springing;
In the winter, woods are green,
Hunger
© Gamaliel Bradford
I love to wander widely, but I understand a cell,
Where you tell and tell your beads because you've
nothing else to tell,
Where the crimson joy of flesh, with all its wild
fantastic tricks,
Is forgotten in the blinding glory of the crucifix.
Juliet's Soliloquy
© William Shakespeare
Farewell!--God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins
The Urban Rat And The Suburban Rat
© Guy Wetmore Carryl
A metropolitan rat invited
His country cousin in town to dine:
Convergence by Christine Stewart-Nunez : American Life in Poetry #249 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
© Ted Kooser
One of the wonderful things about small children is the way in which they cause us to explain the world. “What’s that?” they ask, and we have to come up with an answer. Here Christine Stewart-Nunez, who lives and teaches in South Dakota, tries to teach her son a new word only to hear it come back transformed.
Convergence
Through the bedroom window
Song III
© Edith Nesbit
WE loved, my love, and now it seems
Our love has brought to birth
Friendship, the fairest child of dreams,
The rarest gift of earth.
Overruled
© John Greenleaf Whittier
The threads our hands in blindness spin
No self-determined plan weaves in;
The shuttle of the unseen powers
Works out a pattern not as ours.
Fit The Seventh - The Banker's Fate
© Lewis Carroll
But while he was seeking with thimbles and care,
A Bandersnatch swiftly drew nigh
And grabbed at the Banker, who shrieked in despair,
For he knew it was useless to fly.
American Boys, Hello!
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Oh! we love all the French, and we speak in French
As along through France we go.
The Heaven Of Animals
© James Dickey
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
Against Urania
© Francis Thompson
Lo I, Song's most true lover, plain me sore
That worse than other women she can deceive,
