Life poems
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Lines Written Near San Francisco
© Louis Simpson
I wake and feel the city trembling.
Yes, there is something unsettled in the air
And the earth is uncertain.
Sic Vita
© William Stanley Braithwaite
Heart free, hand free,
Blue above, brown under,
All the world to me
Is a place of wonder.
In The Tunnel
© Francis Bret Harte
Didn't know Flynn,--
Flynn of Virginia,--
Long as he's been 'yar?
Look 'ee here, stranger,
Whar HEV you been?
Pioneers
© Hamlin Garland
THEY rise to mastery of wind and snow;
They go like soldiers grimly into strife
To colonize the plain. They plough and sow,
And fertilize the sod with their own life,
As did the Indian and the buffalo.
Caelica 29: [The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing]
© Fulke Greville
The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing,
Flatters our hope, and tickles our desire,
Nature’s true riches in sweet beauties showing,
Which sets all hearts, with labor’s love, on fire.
First Thanksgiving
© Sharon Olds
When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
If? See No End In Is
© Frank Bidart
What none knows is when, not if.
Now that your life nears its end
when you turn back what you see
is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No,
it is a vast resonating chamber in
which each thing you say or do is
Elegiac Stanzas Suggested By A Picture Of Peele Castle
© William Wordsworth
Ah! then , if mine had been the Painter's hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream;
Impression Du Matin
© Oscar Wilde
THE Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold
Dirge
© Kenneth Fearing
And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,
just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
just one too many,
The Rivers
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
GO! trace th' unnumbered streams, o'er earth
That wind their devious course,
That draw from Alpine heights their birth,
Deep vale, or cavern source.
Prejudice
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
How strangely blind is prejudice, the Negro's greatest foe!
It never fails to see the wrong but naught of good can know.
'Tis blind to all that's lofty, yea, to truth it is opposed,
Degrading things will ope his eyes, while good will keep them closed.
Sonnet X. To Mrs. G
© Charlotte Turner Smith
AH! why will Mem'ry with officious care
The long lost visions of my days renew?
Why paint the vernal landscape green and fair,
When life's gay dawn was opening to my view?
... by an Earthquake
© John Ashbery
A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.
A dies of psychic shock.
Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”
