Life poems
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The Mystic's Vision
© Mathilde Blind
Ah! I shall kill myself with dreams!
These dreams that softly lap me round
Through trance-like hours in which meseems
That I am swallowed up and drowned;
Drowned in your love, which flows o'er me
As o'er the seaweed flows the sea.
A Woman's Farewell.
© Arthur Henry Adams
SO with this farewell kiss I taste at last
The all of life; the Future and the Past
Upon your dear lips dwell.
Love will not come again, though I implore;
A Small Moment by Cornelius Eady: American Life in Poetry #197 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2
© Ted Kooser
I suspect that one thing some people have against reading poems is that they are so often so serious, so devoid of joy, as if we poets spend all our time brooding about mutability and death and never having any fun. Here Cornelius Eady, who lives and teaches in Indiana, offers us a poem of pure pleasure.
Ballad of Reading Gaol - I
© Oscar Wilde
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
Robert Parkes
© Henry Kendall
High travelling winds by royal hill
Their awful anthem sing,
And songs exalted flow and fill
The caverns of the spring.
Three Songs Of The Enigma
© Robert Nichols
The hopeless rain, a sigh, a shadow
Falters and drifts again, again over the meadow,
It wanders lost, drifts hither . . . thither,
It blows, it goes, it knows not whither.
Granny
© Ada Cambridge
Here, in her elbow chair, she sits
A soul alert, alive,
A poor old body shrunk and bent-
The queen-bee of the hive.
Masnawi
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
In the prologue to the Masnavi Rumi hailed Love and its sweet madness that heals all infirmities, and he exhorted the reader to burst the bonds to silver and gold to be free. The Beloved is all in all and is only veiled by the lover. Rumi identified the first cause of all things as God and considered all second causes subordinate to that. Human minds recognize the second causes, but only prophets perceive the action of the first cause. One story tells of a clever rabbit who warned the lion about another lion and showed the lion his own image in a well, causing him to attack it and drown. After delivering his companions from the tyrannical lion, the rabbit urges them to engage in the more difficult warfare against their own inward lusts. In a debate between trusting God and human exertion, Rumi quoted the prophet Muhammad as saying, "Trust in God, yet tie the camel's leg."8 He also mentioned the adage that the worker is the friend of God; so in trusting in providence one need not neglect to use means. Exerting oneself can be giving thanks for God's blessings; but he asked if fatalism shows gratitude.
God is hidden and has no opposite, not seen by us yet seeing us. Form is born of the formless but ultimately returns to the formless. An arrow shot by God cannot remain in the air but must return to God. Rumi reconciled God's agency with human free will and found the divine voice in the inward voice. Those in close communion with God are free, but the one who does not love is fettered by compulsion. God is the agency and first cause of our actions, but human will as the second cause finds recompense in hell or with the Friend. God is like the soul, and the world is like the body. The good and evil of bodies comes from souls. When the sanctuary of true prayer is revealed to one, it is shameful to turn back to mere formal religion. Rumi confirmed Muhammad's view that women hold dominion over the wise and men of heart; but violent fools, lacking tenderness, gentleness, and friendship, try to hold the upper hand over women, because they are swayed by their animal nature. The human qualities of love and tenderness can control the animal passions. Rumi concluded that woman is a ray of God and the Creator's self.
The Son
© Jones Very
Father, I wait thy word. The sun doth stand
Beneath the mingling line of night and day,
Obituary
© Allen Tate
... so what the lame four-poster gathered here
Between the lips of stale and seasoned sheets
Startles a memory sunlit upon the wall
(Motors and urchins contest the city streets)
Italy : 6. Jorasse
© Samuel Rogers
Jorasse was in his three-and-twentieth year;
Graceful and active as a stag just roused;
Gentle withal, and pleasant in his speech,
Yet seldom seen to smile. He had grown up
God's Rest.
© Robert Crawford
I saw God in a dream go by,
As if He trod the phantom air
Within a hushed eternity,
Dead worlds around Him everywhere.
Hyperion
© Stefan Anton George
I journeyed home: such flood of blossoms never
Had welcomed me… a throbbing in the field
Childhood
© William Barnes
Aye, at that time our days wer but vew,
An' our lim's wer but small, an' a-growèn;
Heine In Paris
© Kenneth Slessor
LATE: a cold smear of sunlight bathes the room;
The gilt lime of winter, a sun grown melancholy old,
Streams in the glass. Outside, ten thousand chimneys fume,
Looping the weather-birds with rings of gold;
The Triumph of Dead : Chap. 2
© Mary Sidney Herbert
That night, which did the dreadful hap ensue
That quite eclips'd, nay, rather did replace
The Lake of the Dismal Swamp
© Thomas Moore
"THEY made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by a firefly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.
The Old Mans Dream After He Died
© Robinson Jeffers
from CAWDOR
Gently with delicate mindless fingers
