Life poems
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Dancing
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
DANCING! I love it, night or day:
There's nought on earth so jolly,
Whether you straightly glide with May,
Or madly whirl with Molly,
The Recuperative Power Of Youth.
© Robert Crawford
She has hope's remedy in being young:
When age is on, and life has such a fall,
The efficacy has left that medicine
Which in youth is so vital.
Sonnet LIII.
© Charlotte Turner Smith
FROM THE NOVEL OF CELESTINA.
THE LAPLANDER.
THE shivering native, who by Tenglio's side
Beholds with fond regret the parting light
Full Of Life, Now
© Walt Whitman
FULL of life, now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States,
To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence,
To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you.
The Best Land
© Edgar Albert Guest
If I knew a better land on this glorious world of ours,
Where a man gets bigger money and is working shorter hours;
If the Briton or the Frenchman had an easier life than mine.
I'd pack my goods this minute and I'd sail across the brine.
But I notice when an alien wants a land of hope and cheer
And a future for his children, he comes out and settles here.
Where is my Ruined Life ?
© Shams al-Din Hafiz
WHERE is my ruined life, and where the fame
Of noble deeds?
Look on my long-drawn road, and whence it came,
And where it leads!
The Choice
© William Butler Yeats
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
Fallen In The Night!
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Pelting, undermining, loosening, came the rain;
Through its topmost branches roared the hurricane;
Oft it strained and shivered till the night wore past;
But in dusky daylight there the tree stood fast,
Though its birds had left it, and its leaves were dead,
And its blossoms faded, and its fruit all shed.
Metamorphoses: Book The Ninth
© Ovid
The End of the Ninth Book.
Translated into English verse under the direction of
Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison,
William Congreve and other eminent hands
The Mystery Of Life
© Harriet Beecher Stowe
Life's mystery - deep, restless as the ocean -
Hath surged and wailed for ages to and fro;
Earth's generations watch its ceaseless motion,
As in and out its hollow moanings flow.
Shivering and yearning by that unknown sea,
Let my soul calm itself, O Christ, in thee!
The Rain Poured Down by Dan Gerber: American Life in Poetry #18 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-
© Ted Kooser
Every reader of this column has at one time felt the frightening and paralyzing powerlessness of being a small child, unable to find a way to repair the world. Here the California poet, Dan Gerber, steps into memory to capture such a moment.
The Rain Poured Down
Out of Superstition
© Boris Pasternak
A box of glazed sour fruit compact,
My narrow room.
And oh the grime of lodging rooms
This side the tomb!
Under The Shadow
© James Baker
May it be the shadow of the final prayer,
Or the sudden freeze of the fires warmth at night.
Deciding with the angels sudden dare,
You walk towards your unknowing, final fright.
A Pastoral Dialogue
© Jonathan Swift
My love to Sheelah is more firmly fixt,
Than strongest weeds that grow those stones betwixt;
My spud these nettles from the stones can part;
No knife so keen to weed thee from my heart.
By Candlelight
© Sylvia Plath
This is the fluid in which we meet each other,
This haloey radiance that seems to breathe
And lets our shadows wither
Only to blow
Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.
One match scratch makes you real.
Longfellow
© Henry Van Dyke
In a great land, a new land, a land full of labour
and riches and confusion,
Where there were many running to and fro, and
shouting, and striving together,
In the midst of the hurry and the troubled noise,
I heard the voice of one singing.
Spanish Guerillas
© William Wordsworth
THEY seek, are sought; to daily battle led,
Shrink not, though far outnumbered by their Foes,
For they have learnt to open and to close
The ridges of grim war; and at their head
The Grave By The Lake
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Where the Great Lake's sunny smiles
Dimple round its hundred isles,
And the mountain's granite ledge
Cleaves the water like a wedge,
Ringed about with smooth, gray stones,
Rest the giant's mighty bones.
The Ring And The Book - Chapter IV - Tertium Quid
© Robert Browning
Is so far clear? You know Violante now,
Compute her capability of crime
By this authentic instance? Black hard cold
Crime like a stone you kick up with your foot
I the middle of a field?
