Life poems
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At Cape Schanck
© James Lister Cuthbertson
Down to the lighthouse pillar
The rolling woodland comes,
Of The Nature Of Things: Book III - Part 01 - Proem
© Lucretius
O thou who first uplifted in such dark
So clear a torch aloft, who first shed light
The Damsel Of Peru
© William Cullen Bryant
Where olive leaves were twinkling in every wind that blew,
There sat beneath the pleasant shade a damsel of Peru.
Betwixt the slender boughs, as they opened to the air,
Came glimpses of her ivory neck and of her glossy hair;
And sweetly rang her silver voice, within that shady nook,
As from the shrubby glen is heard the sound of hidden brook.
The Garden Of Boccaccio
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Still in thy garden let me watch their pranks,
…
With that sly satyr peeping through the leaves !
Tallulah Falls
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
ALONE with nature, where her passionate mood
Deepens and deepens, till from shadowy wood,
And sombre shore the blended voices sound
Of five infuriate torrents, wanly crowned
With such pale-misted foam as that which starts
To whitening lips from frenzied human hearts!
The Other Fathers by Lyn Lifshin : American Life in Poetry #251 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-
© Ted Kooser
The poet Lyn Lifshin, who divides her time between New York and Virginia, is one of the most prolific poets among my contemporaries, and has thousands of poems in print, by my loose reckoning. I have been reading her work in literary magazines for at least thirty years. Here’s a good example of this poet at her best.
Love And Life.
© Arthur Henry Adams
I.
AS some faint wisp of fragrance, floating wide
A pennant-perfume on the evening air
From a walled garden, flower-filled and fair,
But Here's An Object More Of Dread
© Abraham Lincoln
But here's an object more of dread
Than aught the grave contains--
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.
The Progress of Error
© William Cowper
Sing, muse (if such a theme, so dark, so long
May find a muse to grace it with a song),
Refuge
© Archibald Lampman
Where swallows and wheatfields are,
O hamlet brown and still,
O river that shineth far,
By meadow, pier, and mill:
Ave Caesar! Morituri Te Salutant
© Mary Hannay Foott
And they who raise it enter too,
With spectral looks and noiseless tread,
Unbidden, hold their dread review,
Beside the Emperors very bed.
Hermann And Dorothea - I. Kalliope
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But the worthy landlord only smiled, and then answer'd
I shall dreadfully miss that ancient calico garment,
Genuine Indian stuff! They're not to be had any longer.
Well! I shall wear it no more. And your poor husband henceforward
Always must wear a surtout, I suppose, or commonplace jacket,
Always must put on his boots; good bye to cap and to slippers!"
Once When We Bought Valentines
© Margaret Widdemer
Slow we tiptoed in the shop, scarlet-cheeked and shy,
Half-elate, half-afraid to be asked to buy,
Sidling toward the prettiest on their swaying strings,
Laughing at the ugliest, monstrous painted things.
(Still the little thrill of fear life was strange, you knew
What if someone sometime sent one of those to you?)
Italy : 38. Foreign Travel
© Samuel Rogers
It was in a splenetic humour that I sat me down to my
scanty fare at Terracina ; and how long I should have
contemplated the lean thrushes in array before me, I
cannot say, if a cloud of smoke, that drew the tears
Love Worn by Lita Hooper: American Life in Poetry #75 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
In many American poems, the poet makes a personal appearance and offers us a revealing monologue from center stage, but there are lots of fine poems in which the poet, a stranger in a strange place, observes the lives of others from a distance and imagines her way into them. This poem by Lita Hooper is a good example of this kind of writing.
Love Worn
In a tavern on the Southside of Chicago
a man sits with his wife. From their corner booth
each stares at strangers just beyond the other's shoulder,
nodding to the songs of their youth. Tonight they will not fight.
Sonnet. "Have you not heard that in some deep-seal'd graves"
© Frances Anne Kemble
Have you not heard that in some deep-seal'd graves,
The Dead retain in beauty undisturb'd
Vain Hope
© Ernest Christopher Dowson
Sometimes, to solace my sad heart, I say,
Though late it be, though lily-time be past,
Song #6.
© Robert Crawford
We have this life, this love only
Kiss me on the mouth, my own!
Dust we'll soon be through the ages,
And who'll reck when we are gone?
Abraham Davenport
© John Greenleaf Whittier
'T was on a May-day of the far old year
Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell
Over the bloom and sweet life of the Spring,
Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,
A horror of great darkness, like the night
In day of which the Norland sagas tell,--
