Life poems
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The Lake of the Thousand Isles
© Evan MacColl
(For Music.)
Though Missouri'stide may majestic glide,
There's a curse on the soil it laves;
The Ohio, too, may be fair, but who
No Words Can Describe It
© Mark Strand
How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace
Pygmaeo-gerano-machia: The Battle Of The Pygmies and Cranes
© James Beattie
Nor less th' alarm that shook the world below,
Where march'd in pomp of war th' embattled foe;
Where mannikins with haughty step advance,
And grasp the shield, and couch the quivering lance;
To right and left the lengthening lines they form,
And rank'd in deep array await the storm.
The Sweetness of Life
© Archibald Lampman
It fell on a day I was happy,
And the winds, the concave sky,
Emptiness
© Katharine Tynan
Where there is nothing God comes in:
The Very God has room enough
In the poor heart that's stripped so clean
Of earth and all the joys thereof.
To a Mountain Daisy
© Robert Burns
Alas! it's no thy neibor sweet,
The bonie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet
Wi' spreck'd breast,
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet
The purpling east.
From Violence to Peace
© James Russell Lowell
Twenty-eight shotgun pellets
crater my thighs, belly and groin.
I gently thumb each burnt bead,
fingering scabbed stubs with ointment.
Esther, A Sonnet Sequence: LII
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
I lived with Esther, not for many days,
If days be counted by the fall of night
And the sun's rising, yet through years of praise,
If truth be timepiece of joys infinite.
What the End Is For
© Jorie Graham
where the heard foams up into the noise of listening,
where the listening arrives without being extinguished.
The huge hum soaks up into the dusk.
The minutes spring open. Six is too many.
From where we watch,
from where even watching is an anachronism,
Preface
© Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
The candlelight sweeps softly through the room,
Filling dim surfaces with golden laughter,
Touching with mystery each high hung rafter,
Cutting a path of promise through the gloom.
Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman
© André Breton
In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
The Alcaldes Daughter
© Madison Julius Cawein
The times they had kissed and parted
That night were over a score;
Each time that the cavalier started,
Each time she would swear him o'er,
Fie, Pleasure, Fie!
© George Gascoigne
Fie pleasure, fie! thou cloyest me with delight,
Thou fill’st my mouth with sweetmeats overmuch;
I wallow still in joy both day and night:
I deem, I dream, I do, I taste, I touch,
No thing but all that smells of perfect bliss;
Fie pleasure, fie! I cannot like of this.
Ormuzd And Ahriman. Part II
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
Fear not, for ye shall live if ye receive
The life divine, obedient to the law
Of truth and good. So shall there be no frown
Upon his face who wills the good of all.
Sea-Weeds.
© Robert Crawford
The sunlight piercing through the blue wave feeds
The joyous growths that, clustered from the air,
Throw forth their fibres to the Power that breeds
Love in the lives above of all things fair
A Psalm of Life: What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
