Life poems
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Youth and Age
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee
Both were mine! Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!
We Are Seven
© André Breton
A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
The Poet And The Children
© John Greenleaf Whittier
WITH a glory of winter sunshine
Over his locks of gray,
In the old historic mansion
He sat on his last birthday;
"It Was a Lover and His Lass"
© William Shakespeare
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That oer the green cornfield did pass,
In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
Laus Veneris
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly — fairer for a fleck.
VII Mon. September [1742] hath xxx days.
© Stephen C. Foster
The Reverse
Studious of Ease, and fond of humble Things,
The Unknown Dead
© Henry Timrod
The rain is plashing on my sill,
But all the winds of Heaven are still;
Hymn to the Comb-Over by Wesley McNair: American Life in Poetry #122 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
© Ted Kooser
The chances are very good that you are within a thousand yards of a man with a comb-over, and he may even be somewhere in your house. Here's Maine poet, Wesley McNair, with his commentary on these valorous attempts to disguise hair loss.
The Condemned
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
AS in those lands of mighty mountain heights,
The streams, by sudden tempests overcharged,
Sweep down the slopes, hearing swift ruin with them,
So I and all my fortunes were engulf'd
To A Child
© Francis Thompson
Whenas my life shall time with funeral tread
The heavy death-drum of the beaten hours,
Kaddish
© Allen Ginsberg
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!
Valedictory
© Aldous Huxley
And life recedes, recedes; the curve is bare,
My handkerchief flutters blankly in the air;
And the question rumbles in the void:
Was she aware, was she after all aware?
On The Western Front
© Alfred Noyes
I found a dreadful acre of the dead,
Marked with the only sign on earth that saves.
The wings of death were hurrying overhead,
The loose earth shook on those unquiet graves;
The Unknown Eros. Book I.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Well dost thou, Love, thy solemn Feast to hold
In vestal February;
Not rather choosing out some rosy day
From the rich coronet of the coming May,
When all things meet to marry!
Easter Night
© Alice Meynell
All night had shout of men
And cry of woeful women filled his way;
Until that noon of sombre sky
On Friday, clamour and display smote him;
No solitude had He,
No silence, since Gethsemane.
The Dead
© Jones Very
I see them crowd on crowd they walk the earth
Dry, leafless trees no Autumn wind laid bare,
How Are Thy Servants Blest, O Lord!
© Joseph Addison
How are Thy servants blest, O Lord!
How sure is their defense!
Eternal wisdom is their guide,
Their help Omnipotence.
Foundations
© William Wilfred Campbell
So life and all its idols hath its hour,
Its fleet, ephemeral dream, its passing show,
Its pomp of fevered hopes that come and go:
Then stripped of vanity and folly's power,
Like some wide water bared to moon and star,
We know ourselves in truth for what we are.
