Life poems
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Elegy IV
© Rainer Maria Rilke
O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are not of one mind. Are not like birds
Car Showroom by Jonathan Holden: American Life in Poetry #161 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-20
© Ted Kooser
I may be a little sappy, but I think that almost everyone is doing the best he or she can, despite all sorts of obstacles. This poem by Jonathan Holden introduces us to a young car salesman, who is trying hard, perhaps too hard. Holden is the past poet laureate of Kansas and poet in residence at Kansas State University in Manhattan.
Car Showroom
Jerusalem Delivered - Book 05 - part 01
© Torquato Tasso
THE ARGUMENT.
Gernando scorns Rinaldo should aspire
Just a Love Letter
© Henry Cuyler Bunner
NEW YORK, July 20, 1883.
DEAR GIRL:
The town goes on as though
It thought you still were in it;
Your Laughter
© Pablo Neruda
Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.
Little Libbie
© Julia A Moore
One more little spirit to Heaven has flown,
To dwell in that mansion above,
Where dear little angels, together roam,
In God's everlasting love.
Queen Mab: Part IV.
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
'How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh,
Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear,
'Ah, Koelue . . .'
© Isaac Rosenberg
Ah, Koelue!
Had you embalmed your beauty, so
It could not backward go,
Or change in any way,
The Dream
© Giacomo Leopardi
It was the morning; through the shutters closed,
Along the balcony, the earliest rays
The Labyrinth
© Henry King
Life is a crooked Labyrinth, and we
Are daily lost in that Obliquity.
'Tis a perplexed circle, in whose round
Nothing but sorrows and new sins abound.
Prosperity
© George Moses Horton
Come, thou queen of every creature,
Nature calls thee to her arms ;
Love sits gay on every feature,
Teeming with a thousand charms.
Shemselnihar
© George Meredith
O my lover! the night like a broad smooth wave
Bears us onward, and morn, a black rock, shines wet.
How I shuddered-I knew not that I was a slave,
Till I looked on thy face:- then I writhed in the net.
Then I felt like a thing caught by fire, that her star
Glowed dark on the bosom of Shemselnihar.
Love, Dreaming of Death
© Charles Harpur
Sat on the earth as on a bier,
Where loss and ruin lived alone,
Without the comfort of a tear
Without a passing groan.
The Village Saturday Night
© Giacomo Leopardi
The dearest day of all the week
Is this, of hope and joy so full;
To-morrow, sad and dull,
The hours will bring, for each must in his thought
His customary task-work seek.
Fragments
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
THE wounded hart and the dying swan
Were side by side
Where the rushes coil with the turn of the tide
The hart and the swan.
Foreign Lands
© Henry Lawson
Here we slave the dull years hopeless for the sake of Wool and Wheat
Here the homes of ugly Commerceniggard farm and haggard street;
Yet our mothers and our fathers won the life the heart demands
Less than fifty years gone over, we were born in Foreign Lands.
The Monk
© Edith Nesbit
WHEN in my narrow cell I lie,
The long day's penance done at last,
I see the ghosts of days gone by,
And hear the voices of the past.
Crumbs Or The Loaf
© Robinson Jeffers
If one should tell them what's clearly seen
They'd not understand; if they understood they would not believe;
Sonnet VII
© George Santayana
I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
