Life poems
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Paradise Lost: Book IV
© Patrick Kavanagh
"Which of those rebel Spirits adjudg'd to Hell
Com'st thou, escap'd thy prison? and, transform'd,
Why satt'st thou like an enemy in wait,
Here watching at the head of these that sleep?"
The Dedication
© Henry Vaughan
To my most merciful, my most loving, and dearly
loved REDEEMER, the ever blessed, the only
HOLY and JUST ONE,
JESUS CHRIST,
I Could Not Tell
© Sharon Olds
I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.
Elegy for a Soldier
© Marilyn Hacker
You, who stood alone in the tall bay window
of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning
with free-flying words, knew the power, terror
in words, in flying;
The Banished Spirit's Song
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Beautiful clime, where I've dwelt so long,
In mirth and music, in gladness and song!
Fairer than aught upon earth art thou-
Beautiful clime, must I leave thee now?
Natalias Resurrection: Sonnet VI
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
So he departed angry and in haste,
A bitter wanderer on the ways of life:
He cared not whither so he found a feast
Spread for his hunger which should need no strife.
The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary
© Heather McHugh
I emulated there, in that
Godawful place. What kind
of face
Ode XVIII: To The Right Honourable Francis Earl Of Huntington
© Mark Akenside
I. 2.
Nor less prevailing is their charm
The vengeful bosom to disarm;
To melt the proud with human woe,
And prompt unwilling tears to flow.
February
© Margaret Atwood
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
Marenghi
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
II.
A massy tower yet overhangs the town,
A scattered group of ruined dwellings now...
Peace In A Palace
© Alfred Noyes
_"All but the whimper of the sea gulls flying,
Endlessly round and round,
Waiting for the faces, the faces from the darkness,
The dreadful rising faces of the drowned._
Cleopatra.
© Robert Crawford
The asp, her baby, on her breast,
She falls asleep,
Ever, like Antony, to rest
While Nile shall keep
Hymn to Life
© James Schuyler
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Portico
© Rubén Dario
I am the singer who of late put by
The verse azulean and the chant profane,
Across whose nights a rossignol would cry
And prove himself a lark at morn again.
The Prayer Of Nature
© George Gordon Byron
Father of Light! great God of Heaven!
Hear'st thou the accents of despair?
Can guilt like man's be e'er forgiven?
Can vice atone for crimes by prayer?
Salve Saturnia Tellus
© Oscar Wilde
I reached the Alps: the soul within me burned
Italia, my Italia, at thy name:
They Betrayed Virtue and the Last Came First...
© Kostas Karyotakis
They betrayed virtue and the last came first.
With money the heart is taken and the friend is appraised.
If once it was shimmering in the mind, in the eyes, in everything,
life is already dark and unfeasible like a legend,
it's bitterness on the lip.
A Psalm For New Years Eve
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
A FRIEND stands at the door;
In either tight-closed hand
Hiding rich gifts, three hundred and three score:
Waiting to strew them daily o'er the land
Toil's Sweet Content
© Sam Walter Foss
The Man of Questions paused and stood
Before the Man of Toil,
And asked, "Are you content, my man,
To dig here in the soil?
