Life poems
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Idyll XXII. The Sons of Leda
© Theocritus
He spoke, and clutched a hollow shell, and blew
His clarion. Straightway to the shadowy pine
Clustering they came, as loud it pealed and long,
Bebrycia's bearded sons; and Castor too,
The peerless in the lists, went forth and called
From the Magnesian ship the Heroes all.
A Legend of Bregenz
© Adelaide Anne Procter
GIRT round with rugged mountains the fair Lake Constance lies;
In her blue heart reflected, shine back the starry skies;
And, watching each white cloudlet float silently and slow,
You think a piece of heaven lies on our earth below!
Life is too short
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Life is too short for any vain regretting;
Let dead delight bury its dead, I say,
And let us go upon our way forgetting
The joys and sorrows of each yesterday
A Farewell
© William Wordsworth
FAREWELL, thou little Nook of mountain-ground,
Thou rocky corner in the lowest stair
Of that magnificent temple which doth bound
One side of our whole vale with grandeur rare;
Olney Hymn 44: Submission
© William Cowper
O Lord, my best desire fulfil,
And help me to resign
Life, health, and comfort to Thy will,
And make Thy pleasure mine.
For Weeks After the Funeral by Andrea Hollander Budy: American Life in Poetry #96 Ted Kooser, U.S. P
© Ted Kooser
Grief can endure a long, long time. A deep loss is very reluctant to let us set it aside, to push it into a corner of memory. Here the Arkansas poet, Andrea Hollander Budy, gives us a look at one family's adjustment to a death.
For Weeks After the Funeral
The house felt like the opera,
the audience in their seats, hushed, ready,
but the cast not yet arrived.
One Life
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
OH, I am hurt to death, my Love;
The shafts of Fate have pierced my striving heart,
The Lady of the Lake: Canto I. - The Chase
© Sir Walter Scott
Introduction.
Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung
Outcast
© Ada Cambridge
And their accuser? She within the fold
That walks in light, bejewelled and belaced,
Who in cold blood, and not for love or need,
Sold the white flower of womanhood for gold;
The wedded harlot, rich and undisgraced,
The viler prostitute in mind and deed.
The White Doe Of Rylstone, Or, The Fate Of The Nortons - Canto Second
© William Wordsworth
THE Harp in lowliness obeyed;
And first we sang of the greenwood shade
And a solitary Maid;
Beginning, where the song must end,
To Sophia (Miss Stacey)
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
Thou art fair, and few are fairer
Of the Nymphs of earth or ocean;
They are robes that fit the wearer--
Enoch Arden
© Alfred Tennyson
At length she spoke `O Enoch, you are wise;
And yet for all your wisdom well know I
That I shall look upon your face no more.'
Princeton, May, 1917
© Alfred Noyes
Here Freedom stood by slaughtered friend and foe,
And, ere the wrath paled or that sunset died,
Looked through the ages; then, with eyes aglow,
Laid them to wait that future, side by side.
To Night
© Joseph Blanco White
Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Birchbrook Mill
© John Greenleaf Whittier
A NOTELESS stream, the Birchbrook runs
Beneath its leaning trees;
That low, soft ripple is its own,
That dull roar is the sea's.
A Day's Ride
© Anonymous
Bold are the mounted robbers who on stolen horses ride
And bold the mounted troopers who patrol the Sydney side;
But few of them, though flash they be, can ride, and few can fight
As Walker did, for life and death, with Ward the other night.
The Flood of Years
© William Cullen Bryant
A MIGHTY Hand, from an exhaustless Urn,
Pours forth the never-ending Flood of Years,
