Life poems
/ page 348 of 844 /
To Sylvia
© Giacomo Leopardi
O Sylvia, dost thou remember still
That period of thy mortal life,
When beauty so bewildering
Shone in thy laughing, glancing eyes,
As thou, so merry, yet so wise,
Youth's threshold then wast entering?
Lines on A Fly-Leaf
© John Greenleaf Whittier
I need not ask thee, for my sake,
To read a book which well may make
The Neckar
© Friedrich Hölderlin
My heart awakened to life in your valleys,
Your waves played around me.
And all of the fair hills that know you,
Wayfarer, are known to me as well.
The Winter's Walk
© Samuel Johnson
Behold, my fair, where'er we rove,
What dreary prospects round us rise,
The naked hill, the leafless grove,
The hoary ground, the frowning skies.
The Marriage Of Geraint
© Alfred Tennyson
'Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud;
Turn thy wild wheel through sunshine, storm, and cloud;
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.
November, 1851
© George MacDonald
Why wilt thou stop and start?
Draw nearer, oh my heart,
And I will question thee most wistfully;
Gather thy last clear resolution
To look upon thy dissolution.
The Right Way
© Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev
Birth of the word is by agony molded,
Through earthly life it is quietly going,
It is a stranger, which drinks from the golden
Pitcher the drops of the savages mourning.
Affinities
© Mathilde Blind
TAKE me to thy heart, and let me
Rest my head a little while;
Rest my heart from griefs that fret me
In the mercy of thy smile.
Envy
© Edgar Albert Guest
It's a bigger thing you're doing than the most of us have done;
We have lived the days of pleasure; now the gray days have begun,
And upon your manly shoulders fall the burdens of the strife;
Yours must be the sacrifices of the trial time of life.
Oh, I don't know how to say it, but I'll never think of you
Without wishing I were sharing in the work you have to do.
The Jewish Cemetery At Newport. (Birds Of Passage. Flight The First)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.
The Charter;
© Helen Maria Williams
ADDRESSED
TO MY NEPHEW
ATHANASE C. L. COQUEREL,
ON HIS WEDDING DAY, 1819.
A Man Meets A Woman In The Street
© Randall Jarrell
Under the separated leaves of shade
Of the gingko, that old tree
A Vision Of The Vatican
© Frances Anne Kemble
Graciously smiling, heavenly Aphrodite
Hath filled my senses with a vague delight;
And Pallas, steadfastly beholding me,
Hath sent me forth in wisdom to be free."
An Artist
© Robinson Jeffers
That sculptor we knew, the passionate-eyed son of a quarryman,
Who astonished Rome and Paris in his meteor youth, and then
was gone, at his high tide of triumphs,
Without reason or good-bye; I have seen him again lately, after
twenty years, but not in Europe.
Unanswered Prayers
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Like some school master, kind in being stern,
Who hears the children crying o'er their slates
The Wonder-Working Magician - Act II
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
CYPRIAN. Ever wrangling in this way,
How ye both my patience try!
Why can he not go? Say why?
"I stand alone at the foot " by William Kloefkorn: American Life in Poetry #147 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poe
© Ted Kooser
Our earliest recollections are often imprinted in our memories because they were associated with some kind of stress. Here, in an untitled poem, the Nebraska State Poet, William Kloefkorn, brings back a difficult moment from many years before, and makes a late confession:
"I stand alone at the foot "
The Castle Of Indolence
© James Thomson
The castle hight of Indolence,
And its false luxury;
Where for a little time, alas!
We lived right jollily.
Metamorphoses: Book The Eighth
© Ovid
The End of the Eighth Book.
Translated into English verse under the direction of
Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison,
William Congreve and other eminent hands
