Life poems
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The Recluse
© James Montgomery
A fountain issuing into light
Before a marble palace, threw
To heaven its column, pure and bright,
Returning thence in showers of dew;
But soon a humbler course it took,
And glide away a nameless brook.
Fairies On The Sea Shore. By Howard
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
FIRST FAIRY.
MY home and haunt are in every leaf,
At The Gate Of The Convent
© Alfred Austin
Beside the Convent Gate I stood,
Lingering to take farewell of those
To whom I owed the simple good
Of three days' peace, three nights' repose.
Shelley's Skylark.
© Thomas Hardy
Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth's oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies -
A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust
Laus Mortis
© Arthur Symons
I bring to thee, for love, white roses, delicate Death!
White lilies of the valley, dropping gentle tears,
A Manchester Poem
© George MacDonald
'Tis a poor drizzly morning, dark and sad.
The cloud has fallen, and filled with fold on fold
The chimneyed city; and the smoke is caught,
And spreads diluted in the cloud, and sinks,
A black precipitate, on miry streets.
And faces gray glide through the darkened fog.
Boys Bathing
© Muriel Stuart
And colder than these waters are
The stream that takes your limbs at last:
Earth's vales and hills drift slowly past. . .
One shore far off, and one more far
Speckled Trout by Ron Rash: American Life in Poetry #28 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Although this poem by North Carolina native Ron Rash may seem to be just about trout fishing, it is the first of several poems Rash has written about his cousin who died years ago. Indirectly, the poet gives us clues about this loss. By the end, we see that in passing from life to death, the fish's colors dull; so, too, may fade the memories of a cherished life long lost.
A Winter Walk
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
WE never had believed, I wis,
At primrose time when west winds stole
Like thoughts of youth across the soul,
In such an altered time as this,
Sonnet LXXVI. To A Young Man Entering The World
© Charlotte Turner Smith
GO now, ingenious youth!--The trying hour
Is come: The world demands that thou shouldst go
To active life: There titles, wealth, and power,
May all be purchased--Yet I joy to know
The Wisdom Of Merlyn
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
These are the time--words of Merlyn, the voice of his age recorded,
All his wisdom of life, the fruit of tears in his youth, of joy in his manhood hoarded,
All the wit of his years unsealed, to the witless alms awarded.
Variations of an Air
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Old King Cole
Was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he
He called for his pipe
and he called for his bowl
and he called for his fiddlers three
The Valediction
© William Cowper
Farewell, false hearts! whose best affections fail,
Like shallow brooks which summer suns exhale;
Sonnet XXXIX: Because Thou Hast the Power
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Because thou hast the power and own'st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me
Kings Chapel
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Is it a weanling's weakness for the past
That in the stormy, rebel-breeding town,
Swept clean of relics by the levelling blast,
To Thyrza
© George Gordon Byron
Without a stone to mark the spot,
And say, what Truth might well have said,
By all, save one, perchance forgot,
Ah! wherefore art thou lowly laid?
