Life poems
/ page 437 of 844 /
On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born
© Charles Lamb
I saw where in the shroud did lurk
A curious frame of Nature's work.
A Magic Mountain
© Czeslaw Milosz
I don’t remember exactly when Budberg died, it was either two years
ago or three.
The same with Chen. Whether last year or the one before.
Soon after our arrival, Budberg, gently pensive,
Said that in the beginning it is hard to get accustomed,
For here there is no spring or summer, no winter or fall.
This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
To Rosa
© Abraham Lincoln
You are young, and I am older;
You are hopeful, I am not
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder
Pluck the roses ere they rot.
In School-days
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow,
And blackberry-vines are creeping.
You and I Saw Hawks Exchanging the Prey
© James Wright
Smaller than she, he goes
Claw beneath claw beneath
Needles and leaning boughs,
Modern Love: XVI
© George Meredith
In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,
When in the firelight steadily aglow,
Boundary Issues
© John Ashbery
Here in life, they would understand.
How could it be otherwise? We had groped too,
unwise, till the margin began to give way,
at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both.
The House of Life: 36. Life-in-Love
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair
Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show
For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;
Even so much life endures unknown, even where,
'Mid change the changeless night environeth,
Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.
A Little Language
© Robert Duncan
I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
abhors the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He
converses when he wants with me. To speak
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
The Peacock at Alderton
© Geoffrey Hill
Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
The School Where I Studied
© John Wesley
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
The Green Linnet
© André Breton
Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow-white blossoms on my head,
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
© Geoffrey Hill
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 7
© Alfred Tennyson
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
