Life poems
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Land’s End
© Weldon Kees
A day all blue and white, and we
Came out of woods to sand
And snow-capped waves. The sea
Rose with us as we walked, the land
Built dunes, a lighthouse, and a sky of gulls.
HYMNS: My God! I Know, I Feel Thee Mine
© Charles Wesley
1
My God! I know, I feel thee mine,
And will not quit my claim
Till all I have is lost in thine,
And all renewed I am.
Flight
© Boris Pasternak
Yesterday my wife held me here
as I thrashed and moaned, her hand
in my foaming mouth, and my son
saw what he was warned he might.
Failure
© George Essex Evans
THE BOY went out from the ranges grim,
And the breath of the mountains went with him;
'39'
© Henry Lawson
Then heres the living Forties!
The Forties! The Forties!
Then heres the living Forties!
Were good for ten years more.
Ode To Maize
© Pablo Neruda
But, poet, let
history rest in its shroud;
praise with your lyre
the grain in its granaries:
sing to the simple maize in the kitchen.
Thanatopsis
© William Cullen Bryant
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
'Atkins'
© George Meredith
Yonder's the man with his life in his hand,
Legs on the march for whatever the land,
Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi.
"O Cæsar, we who are about to die
Salute you!" was the gladiators' cry
In the arena, standing face to face
With death and with the Roman populace.
Allegro Maestoso
© William Ernest Henley
Spring winds that blow
As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may;
In A/C with Ghosts
© Kenneth Slessor
You can shuffle and scuffle and scold,
You can rattle the knockers and knobs,
I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris
© Louis Simpson
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris
I stood alone in a deserted square.
The night was trembling with a violet
Expectancy. At the far edge it moved
And rumbled; on that flickering horizon
The guns were pumping color in the sky.
Ehue! Fugaces, Posthume, Labuntur Anni
© Jones Very
Fleeting years are ever bearing
In their silent course away
All that in our pleasures sharing
Lent to life a cheering ray.
To a Young Poet
© Mahmoud Darwish
Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.
A Receipt to Cure the Vapors
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
I
Why will Delia thus retire,
And idly languish life away?
While the sighing crowd admire,
’Tis too soon for hartshorn tea:
I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open
© John Wesley
3
And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt:
the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land,
two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left.
Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert,
perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span.
Nature, Betrothed and Wedded
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
HAVE you not noted how in early spring,
From out the forests, past the murmuring brooks,
O'er the hillsides, Nature, with airy grace,
Like some fair virgin, touched by lights and shades,
In Misty Blue
© Robert Laurence Binyon
In misty blue the lark is heard
Above the silent homes of men;
