Life poems
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My Lifes Delight
© Thomas Campion
Come, O come, my lifes delight,
Let me not in languor pine!
Love loves no delay; thy sight,
The more enjoyed, the more divine:
O come, and take from me
The pain of being deprived of thee!
A Marriage Poem
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
What does it mean when a woman says,
“my husband,”
if she sits all day in the tub;
if she worries her life like a dog a rat;
if her husband seems familiar but abstract,
a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use.
Ulysses
© Alfred Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
(Sing the song of the moment...)
© Anselm Hollo
Sing the song of the moment in careless carols, in the transient light of the day;
Sing of the fleeting smiles that vanish and never look back;
Sing of the flowers that bloom and fade without regret.
Weave not in memorys thread the days that would glide into nights.
To the guests that must go bid God-speed, and wipe away all traces of their steps.
Let the moments end in moments with their cargo of fugitive songs.
from The Seasons: Winter
© James Thomson
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
Dreamwood
© Adrienne Rich
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
Near Helikon
© Trumbull Stickney
By such an all-embalming summer day
As sweetens now among the mountain pines
The Past
© Henry Timrod
To-days most trivial act may hold the seed
Of future fruitfulness, or future dearth;
Oh, cherish always every word and deed!
The simplest record of thyself hath worth.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
© André Breton
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze
© Cornelius Eady
And mothers letting their babies
Be held by strangers.
And the bus drivers
Taping over their fare boxes
And willing to give directions.
Identity
© William Stanley Merwin
When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog
somewhere in a Germany that has
Light
© C. K. Williams
Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples—
[My prime of youth is but a frost of cares]
© Chidiock Tichborne
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
For My Wife
© Wesley McNair
How were we to know, leaving your two kids
behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon
Come Up from the Fields Father
© Walt Whitman
Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
A Little Called Pauline
© Gertrude Stein
A little called anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope.
No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices.
A little lace makes boils. This is not true.
Yarrow Revisited
© André Breton
The gallant Youth, who may have gained,
Or seeks, a "winsome Marrow,"
Iowa City: Early April
© Robert Hass
And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight.
He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal
Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds.
