Life poems
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His Youth
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Dying? I am not dying. Are you mad?
You think I need to ask for heavenly grace?
\I\ think \you\ are a fiend, who would be glad
To see me struggle in death's cold embrace.
To the Moon [Earlier Version]
© Charles Harpur
WITH silent step behold her steal
Over those envious clouds that hid
A Poetical Version Of A Letter From Facob Behmen
© John Byrom
TIS Mans own Nature, which in its own Life,
Or Centre, stands in Enmity and Strife,
The Nest
© James Russell Lowell
When oaken woods with buds are pink,
And new-come birds each morning sing,
When fickle May on Summer's brink
Pauses, and knows not which to fling,
Whether fresh bud and bloom again,
Or hoar-frost silvering hill and plain,
Andante Con Moto
© William Ernest Henley
Forth from the dust and din,
The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare,
Riddles By Dr. Swift And His Friends
© Jonathan Swift
FROM Venus born, thy beauty shows;
But who thy father, no man knows:
Nor can the skilful herald trace
The founder of thy ancient race;
To The Germans
© Tadeusz Borowski
Don't walk in the street,don't eat, don't live,
backbreaking work is all you're allowed,
and beware the sign that bares its teeth:
"Only for Germans, others keep out."
To A Child
© Christopher Morley
The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
A New Pilgrimage: Sonnet XXVIII
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Yet it is pitiful how friendships die,
Spite of our oaths eternal and high vows.
Some fall through blight of tongues wagged secretly,
Some through strifes loud in empty honour's house.
Andrew Rykmans Prayer
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Andrew Rykman's dead and gone;
You can see his leaning slate
In the graveyard, and thereon
Read his name and date.
Opals
© Arthur Symons
My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.
The fields of earth are in it, green and glimmering,
Bobs
© Jessie Pope
The call came in the stormy night,
Beneath a stranger's sky.
The soldier of a life-long fight,
Still fighting, went to die.
Dedication
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
THE SEA gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea;
An Attempt To Remember The "Grandmother's Apology"
© Horace Smith
And Willie, my eldest born, is gone, you say, little Anne,
Ruddy and white, and strong on his legs, he looks like a man;
He was only fourscore years, quite young, when he died;
I ought to have gone before, but must wait for time and tide.
To An Infant
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To anger rapid and as soon appeased,
For trifles mourning and by trifles pleased;
Break friendship's mirror with a tetchy blow,
Yet snatch what coals of fire on pleasure's altar glow!
Safari, Rift Valley by Roy Jacobstein: American Life in Poetry #116 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2
© Ted Kooser
It's the oldest kind of story: somebody ventures deep into the woods and comes back with a tale. Here Roy Jacobstein returns to America to relate his experience on a safari to the place believed by archaeologists to be the original site of human life. And against this ancient backdrop he closes with a suggestion of the brevity of our lives.
Written In A Diary
© Frances Anne Kemble
They who go down to the relentless deep,
After long horrible death of cold and drought
