Life poems
/ page 473 of 844 /
February Evening in New York
© Denise Levertov
As the stores close, a winter light
opens air to iris blue,
Outlook
© Archibald Lampman
Not to be conquered by these headlong days,
But to stand free: to keep the mind at brood
On life's deep meaning, nature's altitude
Of loveliness, and time's mysterious ways;
Phyllis
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Sunshine or shadow, or gold day or gray day,
Life must be lived as our destinies rule;
Leisure or labor or work day or play day
Feasts for the famous and fun for the fool;
Phyllis, ah, Phyllis, my life is a gray day.
Poems - Written On The Deaths Of Three Lovely Children
© Jean Ingelow
Yellow leaves, how fast they flutter-woodland hollows thickly strewing,
Where the wan October sunbeams scantly in the mid-day win,
While the dim gray clouds are drifting, and in saddened hues imbuing
All without and all within!
Fiat
© Boris Pasternak
Dawn will set candles guttering.
It will light up and loose the swifts.
With this reminder I'll burst in:
Let life be just as fresh as this!
Like Brothers We Meet
© George Moses Horton
Dedicated to the Federal and Late Confederate Soldiers
Like heart-loving brothers we meet,
Epitaph
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Stop, Christian passer-by!Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
Ancestor
© James Russell Lowell
It was a time when they were afraid of him.
My father, a bare man, a gypsy, a horse
Rich And Poor
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
Neath the radiance faint of the starlit sky
The gleaming snow-drifts lay wide and high;
Oer hill and dell stretched a mantle white,
The branches glittered with crystal bright;
But the winter winds keen icy breath
Was merciless, numbing and chill as death.
Amoretti LXXXIX: Lyke as the Culver on the barèd bough
© Edmund Spenser
Lyke as the Culver on the barèd bough,
Sits mourning for the absence of her mate:
Chicago Poem
© Lew Welch
I lived here nearly 5 years before I could
meet the middle western day with anything approaching
Visitation by Jeffrey Harrison: American Life in Poetry #115 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
Each of the senses has a way of evoking time and place. In this bittersweet poem by Jeffrey Harrison of Massachusetts, birdsong offers reassurance as the speaker copes with loss.
Visitation
Fears In Solitude. Written In April, 1798, During The Alarm Of An Invasion
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A green and silent spot, amid the hills,
A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place
No singing sky-lark ever poised himself.
The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope,
Improvisations: Light And Snow: 08
© Conrad Aiken
Many things perplex me and leave me troubled,
Many things are locked away in the white book of stars
An Essay on Man: Epistle I
© Alexander Pope
To Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke
Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
Eagle Affirmation
© John Kinsella
You’ve got to understand that sighting the pair
of eagles over the block, right over our house,
Over The Hills
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Over the hills and the valleys of dreaming
Slowly I take my way.
Life is the night with its dream-visions teeming,
Death is the waking at day.
