Life poems
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Questions Of Life
© John Greenleaf Whittier
A bending staff I would not break,
A feeble faith I would not shake,
Nor even rashly pluck away
The error which some truth may stay,
Whose loss might leave the soul without
A shield against the shafts of doubt.
Satire IV
© John Donne
Well; I may now receive, and die. My sin
Indeed is great, but yet I have been in
Constancy to an Ideal Object
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Since all that beat about in Nature's range,
Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain
The Shipwreck Of Idomeneus
© George Meredith
Amid the din of elemental strife,
No voice may pierce but Deity supreme:
And Deity supreme alone can hear,
Above the hurricane's discordant shrieks,
The cry of agonized humanity.
The Pioneer
© James Russell Lowell
What man would live coffined with brick and stone,
Imprisoned from the healing touch of air,
And cramped with selfish landmarks everywhere,
When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone,
The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?
A Chaunt In Praise
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
How many hymns have I chaunted, Lady, in laud of thee,
Each with a sigh for its burthen, tear for its antiphon?
Love--songs are sweet in the morning. All things in praise of thee
Evening and morning rejoice, intoning in unison.
To the Noblest and Best of Ladies, the Countess of Denbigh
© Richard Crashaw
Persuading her to resolution in religion, and to
Render herself without further delay into the
Communion of the Catholic Church
"Needs must I sing"
© Thibaut de Champagne
Lady, relent: thou whom all gifts adorn,
Who dost all worth and every grace display,
More than all other dames that e'er were born,
And give me kindly succour, since you may.
Paradise Lost: Book XII (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
AS one who in his journey bates at Noone,
Though bent on speed, so heer the Archangel paus'd
Betwixt the world destroy'd and world restor'd,
If Adam aught perhaps might interpose;
Then with transition sweet new Speech resumes.
Down By the Salley Gardens
© William Butler Yeats
Down by the salley gardens
my love and I did meet;
Rescue The Slave
© Anonymous
This song was composed while George Latimer, the fugitive slave, was
confined in Leverett Street Jail, Boston, expecting to be carried back
to Virginia by James B. Gray, his claimant.
Eight Variations
© Weldon Kees
1.
Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns,
But that was quite some time ago.
Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs,
Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.
The Song Of The Sword--To Rudyard Kipling
© William Ernest Henley
The Sword
Singing -
The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword
Clanging imperious
Forth from Time's battlements
His ancient and triumphing Song.
A Hope
© Charles Kingsley
Twin stars, aloft in ether clear,
Around each other roll alway,
Within one common atmosphere
Of their own mutual light and day.
Gnothi Seauton
© Samuel Johnson
What then remains? Must I, in slow decline,
To mute inglorious ease old age resign?
Or, bold ambition kindling in my breast,
Attempt some arduous task? Or, were it best,
Brooding o'er lexicons to pass the day,
And in that labour drudge my life away?
The Return
© Frank Bidart
As the retreating Bructeri began to burn their own
possessions, to deny to the Romans every sustenance but
ashes,
lifeline
© Evie Shockley
wedged in the top branches, rain still sighing
to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves,
from The Testament of Love
© John Hall Wheelock
from Book I, Introduction
Man’s Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,
Singing School
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Ulster was British, but with no rights on
The English lyric: all around us, though
We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.
