Life poems
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The Bear Hunt
© Abraham Lincoln
A wild-bear chace, didst never see?
Then hast thou lived in vain.
Thy richest bump of glorious glee,
Lies desert in thy brain.
The Purgatory Of St. Patrick - Act I
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
KING. Yes, from this rocky height,
Nigh to the sun, that with one starry light
Its rugged brow doth crown,
Headlong among the salt waves leaping down
Let him descend who so much pain perceives;
There let him raging die who raging lives.
Eliza Harris
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Like a fawn from the arrow, startled and wild,
A woman swept by us, bearing a child;
In her eye was the night of a settled despair,
And her brow was o’ershaded with anguish and care.
Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun
© Emily Jane Brontë
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun
Restored my earth to joy
Have you departed, every one,
And left a desert sky?
The Way Of The World
© Edgar Albert Guest
IT'S ALL in the way that you look at the world,
It's all in the way that you do things,
How precious are thy thoughts of peace
© James Montgomery
How precious are thy thoughts of peace,
O God! to me; how great their sum!
New every morn, they never cease;
They were, they are, and yet shall come,
In number and in compass more
Than ocean's sand, or ocean's shore.
from The Task, Book VI: The Winter Walk at Noon
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Thus heav’n-ward all things tend. For all were once
Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand
© Walt Whitman
Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
The Prime of Life
© Henry Lawson
OH, the strength of the toil of those twenty years, with father, and master, and men!
And the clearer brain of the business man, who has held his own for ten:
Oh, the glorious freedom from business fears, and the rest from domestic strife!
The past is dead, and the future assured, and Im in the prime of life!
Believe It
© John Logan
There is a two-headed goat, a four-winged chicken
and a sad lamb with seven legs
whose complicated little life was spent in Hopland,
California. I saw the man with doubled eyes
who seemed to watch in me my doubts about my spirit.
Will it snag upon this aging flesh?
Curriculum Vitae
© Samuel Menashe
Scribe out of work
At a loss for words
Not his to begin with,
The man life passed by
Stands at the window
Biding his time
My Shoes
© Charles Simic
Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice nests.
Later On
© William Percy French
Later on, later on,
Oh what many friends have gone,
Sweet lips that smiled and loving eyes that shone
Through the darkness into light,
One by one they've winged their flight
And perhaps we'll play together -- later on.
On the Death of Anne Brontë
© Octavio Paz
THERE 's little joy in life for me,
And little terror in the grave;
I 've lived the parting hour to see
Of one I would have died to save.
