Life poems
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Verses For Pictures
© William Morris
I am Day; I bring again
Life and glory, Love and pain:
Awake, arise! from death to death
Through me the Worlds tale quickeneth.
The Ruling Thought
© Giacomo Leopardi
Most sweet, most powerful,
Controller of my inmost soul;
The terrible, yet precious gift
Of heaven, companion kind
Of all my days of misery,
O thought, that ever dost recur to me;
Ode to Salvador Dali
© Federico Garcia Lorca
A rose in the high garden you desire.
A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.
The mountain stripped bare of Impressionist fog,
The grays watching over the last balustrades.
Croquet
© Alice Guerin Crist
In a garden where the may made the straggling fences gay
And the roses cream and scarlet shed their petals on the breeze
Your maiden aunts and I, and you, demure and shy,
Played a sober game of croquet underneath the spreading trees.
The Human Sacrifice
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I.
FAR from his close and noisome cell,
By grassy lane and sunny stream,
Blown clover field and strawberry dell,
Queen Mab: Part I.
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
FAIRY
'Spirit! who hast dived so deep;
Spirit! who hast soared so high;
Thou the fearless, thou the mild,
Accept the boon thy worth hath earned,
Ascend the car with me!'
Thora
© Celia Thaxter
Come under my cloak, my darling!
Thou little Norwegian main!
Nor wind, nor rain, nor rolling sea
Shall chill or make thee afraid.
In November by Lisel Mueller: American Life in Poetry #85 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
The Illinois poet, Lisel Mueller, is one of our country's finest writers, and the following lines, with their grace and humility, are representative of her poems of quiet celebration.
Ode To Lycoris. May 1817
© William Wordsworth
I
AN age hath been when Earth was proud
Of lustre too intense
To be sustained; and Mortals bowed
A Pastoral Of Phyllis And Corydon
© Nicholas Breton
On a hill there grows a flower,
Fair befall the dainty sweet!
By that flower there is a bower,
Where the heavenly Muses meet.
In London
© Dora Wilcox
When I look out on London's teeming streets,
On grim grey houses, and on leaden skies,
Cyder: Book II
© John Arthur Phillips
Sometimes thou shalt with fervent Vows implore
A moderate Wind; the Orchat loves to wave
With Winter-Winds, before the Gems exert
Their feeble Heads; the loosen'd Roots then drink
Large Increment, Earnest of happy Years.
Poetic Aphorisms. (From The Sinngedichte Of Friedrich Von Logau)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
MONEY
Whereunto is money good?
Who has it not wants hardihood,
Who has it has much trouble and care,
Who once has had it has despair.
The Ruined Abbey, or, The Affects of Superstition
© William Shenstone
At length fair Peace, with olive crown'd, regains
Her lawful throne, and to the sacred haunts
Colour
© William Henry Ogilvie
There's colour in the woodlands as far as eye can reach,
Pale gold upon the elm-tree and bronze upon the beech;
Sonnet XXXI. Life And Death. 3.
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
IF death be final, what is life, with all
Its lavish promises, its thwarted aims,
Its lost ideals, its dishonored claims,
Its uncompleted growth? A prison wall,
In Memoriam A. H. H.: 121.
© Alfred Tennyson
The market boat is on the stream,
And voices hail it from the brink;
Thou hear'st the village hammer clink,
And see'st the moving of the team.
