Life poems
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A Valentine
© Edgar Albert Guest
YOUR cheeks are pinker than the rose,
Your eyes are bluer than the skies;
The Vanguard [1]
© Henry Lawson
Let the Jingo in his blindness cant and cackle as he will;
But across the path from Asia run the Russian trenches still!
And the sahib in his rickshaw may loll back and smoke at ease,
While the haggard, ragged heroes man the battered batteries.
[Deeply repentant of my sinful ways]
© Gaspara Stampa
Deeply repentant of my sinful ways
And of my trivial, manifold desires,
Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration
© Ernest Christopher Dowson
Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.
Human Life, On The Denial Of Immortality
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
The Passing Show
© Ambrose Bierce
I
I know not if it was a dream. I viewed
A city where the restless multitude,
Between the eastern and the western deep
Had reared gigantic fabrics, strong and rude.
The Lost Pilot
© James Tate
for my father, 1922-1944
Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him
Poems
© Anselm Hollo
i
thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.
ii
The Three Graves. A Fragment Of A Sexton's Tale
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The grapes upon the Vicar's wall
Were ripe as ripe could be;
And yellow leaves in sun and wind
Were falling from the tree.
Lux In Tenebris
© George Essex Evans
So set they discord in the sweetest singing,
And a sharp thorn about the fairest rose;
And doubt around the cross where faith was clinging,
And fear to haunt the regions of repose;
And dimmed mens eyes, so that they should not see,
Like Gods, the vistas of futurity.
The Universal Prayer
© Alexander Pope
Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
The Peasant Girl Of The Rhone
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
There is but one place in the world:
Thither where he lies buried!
Anon
