Life poems
/ page 334 of 844 /
The Martyrs
© Archibald Lampman
Yet still across life's tangled storms we see,
Following the cross, your pale procession led,
One hope, one end, all others sacrificed,
Self-abnegation, love, humility,
Your faces shining toward the bended head,
The wounded hands and patient feet of Christ.
For My Wife by Wesley McNair : American Life in Poetry #255 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
A honeymoon. How often does one happen according to the dreams that preceded it? In this poem, Wesley McNair, a poet from Maine, describes a first night of marriage in a tawdry place. But all’s well that ends well.
Threnodia Augustalis: Overture - A Solemn Dirge
© Oliver Goldsmith
ARISE, ye sons of worth, arise,
And waken every note of woe;
When truth and virtue reach the skies,
'Tis ours to weep the want below!
To the Rev. John Saunders on his Departure for England
© Charles Harpur
If a large love of the whole human race,
With charity that hopeth a meet cure
The Young Mother
© Katharine Tynan
In dreadful times of tears and war
She sails, a little fixed star,
Or like a little ship she glides
With gentle winds and favouring tides
Up to the harbour bar.
Of The Son of Man
© George MacDonald
I. I honour Nature, holding it unjust
To look with jealousy on her designs;
On The Mad-House In Venice
© Richard Monckton Milnes
Honour aright the philosophic thought,
That they who, by the trouble of the brain
Or heart, for usual life are overwrought,
Hither should come to discipline their pain.
Spring And Autumn
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
The apple blossom from the bough is falling
In sunshine hours, the long young days of summer,
An Old Lesson From The Fields
© Archibald Lampman
Oh, light, I cried, and, heaven, with all your blue,
Oh, earth, with all your sunny fruitfulness,
And ye, tall lillies, of the wind-vexed field,
What power and beauty life indeed might yield,
Could we but cast away its conscious stress,
Simple of heart, becoming even as you.
Elegy
© James Beattie
Tired with the busy crowds, that all the day
Impatient throng where Folly's altars flame,
My languid powers dissolve with quick decay,
Till genial Sleep repair the sinking frame.
Insomnia by Rynn Williams: American Life in Poetry #145 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
I try floating out along the long O of lone,
to where it flattens to loss, and just stay there
disconnecting the dots of my night sky
as one would take apart a house made of sticks,
carefully, last addition to first,
like sheep leaping backward into their pens.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2007 by Rynn Williams, whose most recent book of poetry is âAdonis Garage,â? University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Poem reprinted from âColumbia Poetry Review,â? no. 20, Spring 2007, by permission of Rynn Williams. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Life From The Lifeless
© Robinson Jeffers
Spirits and illusions have died,
The naked mind lives
In the beauty of inanimate things.
The Fire-side
© Nathaniel Cotton
Dear Chloe, while the busy crowd,
The vain, the wealthy, and the proud,
In folly's maze advance;
Tho' singularity and pride
Be call'd our choice, we'll step aside,
Nor join the giddy dance.
The Psalm Of A Sojourner
© Henry Van Dyke
Thou hast taken me into the tent of the world, O God:
Beneath thy blue canopy I have found shelter:
Therefore thou wilt not deny me the right of a guest.
Ah, If You Knew
© Mathilde Blind
Ah, if you knew how soon and late
My eyes long for a sight of you
Sometimes in passing by my gate
You'd linger until fall of dew,
If you but knew!
To Any Member Of My Generation
© George Barker
Whenever we kissed we cocked the future's rifles
And from our wild-oat words, like dragon's teeth,
Death underfoot now arises; when we were gay
Dancing together in what we hoped was life,
Who was it in our arms but the whores of death
Whom we have found in our beds today, today?
Eclogue 3: Menalcas Daemoetas Palaemon
© Publius Vergilius Maro
DAMOETAS
Nay, they are Aegon's sheep, of late by him
Committed to my care.
Unending Love
© Rabindranath Tagore
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
