Life poems
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Dolce Far Niente
© Peter McArthur
Before Jove's throne, upon Olympus stretched
With hands beneath my head, with careless eyes
Exploring the vasty, vaulted heavens, I'd munch
The rustic straw, or in the fatted form
Of some church-going citizen would yawn
While Hermes or Apollo spake.
Do not fret, do not cry, do not tax...
© Boris Pasternak
Do not fret, do not cry, do not tax
Your last strength, and your heart do not torture.
You're alive, you're inside me, intact,
As a buttress, a friend, an adventure.
Scherzo
© James Russell Lowell
When the down is on the chin
And the gold-gleam in the hair,
When the birds their sweethearts win
And champagne is in the air,
Love is here, and Love is there,
Love is welcome everywhere.
The Swamp
© Roderic Quinn
FOR one whole day and a long night through
We made our camp
In a she-oak grove by a coastal swamp.
Our tent gleamed white in the she-oak trees,
Jolly Jack
© William Makepeace Thackeray
When fierce political debate
Throughout the isle was storming,
Love Is A Parallax
© Sylvia Plath
'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.'
Elegy XIV. Declining an Invitation To Visit Foreign Countries
© William Shenstone
While others, lost to friendship, lost to love,
Waste their best minutes on a foreign strand,
Be mine, with British nymph or swain to rove,
And court the Genius of my native land.
The Ring And The Book - Chapter VI - Giuseppe Caponsacchi
© Robert Browning
Again the morning found me. I will work,
Tie down my foolish thoughts. Thank God so far!
I have saved her from a scandal, stopped the tongues
Had broken else into a cackle and hiss
Around the noble name. Duty is still
Wisdom: I have been wise. So the day wore.
Secret Love
© Amelia Opie
Not one kind look….one friendly word!
Wilt thou in chilling silence sit;
Nor through the social hour afford
One cheering smile, or beam of wit?
The Bethlehem Nursing Home by Rodney Torreson: American Life in Poetry #25 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Lau
© Ted Kooser
Emily Dickinson said that poems come at the truth at a slant. Here a birdbath and some overturned chairs on a nursing home lawn suggest the frailties of old age. Masterful poems choose the very best words and put them in the very best places, and Michigan poet Rodney Torreson has deftly chosen "ministers" for his first verb, an active verb that suggests the good work of the nursing home's chaplain.
The Younger Brutus
© Giacomo Leopardi
When in the Thracian dust uprooted lay,
In ruin vast, the strength of Italy,
Australia Vindex
© Henry Kendall
She is fairer than flowers of love;
She is fiercer than wind-driven flame;
And God from His thunders above
Hath smitten the soul of her shame.
By The Seaside : The Building Of The Ship
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
On the deck another bride
Is standing by her lover's side.
Shadows from the flags and shrouds,
Like the shadows cast by clouds,
Broken by many a sunny fleck,
Fall around them on the deck.
On Fields O'er Which The Reaper's Hand Has Pass'd
© Henry David Thoreau
On fields o'er which the reaper's hand has pass'd
Lit by the harvest moon and autumn sun,
Italy : 51. Marco Griffoni
© Samuel Rogers
War is a game at which all are sure to lose, sooner or
later, play they how they will; yet every nation has
delighted in war, and none more in their day than the
little republic of Genoa, whose galleys, while she had
How Long
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
How long will you think about this painful life?
How long will you think about this harmful world?
The only thing it can take from you is your body.
Don't say all this rubbish and stop thinking.
The Man of Sentiment
© Kenneth Slessor
Part One
[A walled garden of York. It is an August Sunday, and the baying of deep church-bells is blown faintly in a warm wind. Laurence Sterne, prebendary, aged forty-six, and Catherine de Fromantel, a girl who sings at Ranelagh, are dawdling through the arbours, and pause at a path which runs between hedges and cypress-trees round a corner some fifty yards away. Catherine has walked down such a path before, it is to be feared, and halts cautiously upon its fringes.]
Laurence:
Nay, 'tis no Devil's walk,
The Call
© George Herbert
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.
Homer's Battle Of The Frogs And Mice. Book III
© Thomas Parnell
But down Olympus to the Western Seas,
Far-shooting Phbus drove with fainter Rays,
And a whole War (so Jove ordain'd) begun,
Was fought, and ceas'd, in one revolving Sun.
