Life poems
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The Father Of Toads
© Russell Edson
It's hard enough to love a toad, but when it turns out to be
your own son then revulsion is without any tender inhibition,
he said.
My Little Soul I Never Saw
© Grace Fallow Norton
My little soul I never saw,
Nor can I count its days;
I do not know its wondrous law
And yet I know its ways.
The Fathers Curse
© Victor Marie Hugo
M. ST. VALLIER (_an aged nobleman, from whom King Francis I.
decoyed his daughter, the famous beauty, Diana of
Poitiers_).
Midsummer Midnight Skies
© William Ernest Henley
The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze
To let the marvel by. The grey road glooms . . .
Glimmers . . . goes out . . . and there, O, there where it fades,
What grace, what glamour, what wild will,
Transfigure the shadows? Whose,
Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours?
In Memoriam Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse
© Henry Kendall
SHALL he, on whom the fair lord, Delphicus,
Turned gracious eyes and countenance of shine,
Be left to lie without a wreath from us,
To sleep without a flower upon his shrine?
The Patrol And The Gold-Digger
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Gordon, mounted, loq.
Ho ! you chap of grit and sinew,
Smoking in your pit,
Why thus labour discontinue ?
Why your forehead knit ?
A Convent Wothout God
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Here a base turnkey novice--master is,
Teaching humility. The matin bell
Calls thee to toil, but little comforteth.
None heed thy prayers or give the kiss of peace.
Nathless, my soul, be valiant. Even in Hell
Wisdom shall preach to thee of life and death.
You
© Russell Edson
Out of nothing there comes a time called childhood, which
is simply a path leading through an archway called
adolescence. A small town there, past the arch called youth.
Soon, down the road, where one almost misses the life
A Stone Is Nobody's
© Russell Edson
A man ambushed a stone. Caught it. Made it a prisoner.
Put it in a dark room and stood guard over it for the
rest of his life.
Angels
© Russell Edson
Like birds, and yet so human . . .
They mate by briefly looking at the other.
Their eggs are like white jellybeans.
"Philip My King."
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Banned from earth's day--thine inward sight expands
Above the night-bound senses' birth or bars;
Lord of a larger realm, of subtler scope,
Where thou at last shalt press the lips of Hope,
And feel God's angel lift in radiant hands
Thy life from darkness to a place of stars!
Richard H. Dana, Sen.
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O DEEP grave eyes! that long have seemed to gaze
On our low level from far loftier days,
O grand gray head! all aureole seemed to gird,
Drawn from the spirit's pure, immaculate rays!
The Columbiad: Book X
© Joel Barlow
From that mark'd stage of man we now behold,
More rapid strides his coming paths unfold;
His continents are traced, his islands found,
His well-taught sails on all his billows bound,
His varying wants their new discoveries ply,
And seek in earth's whole range their sure supply.
Epilogue
© Robert Lowell
Those bless?d structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
The Drunken Fisherman
© Robert Lowell
Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
© Robert Lowell
"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
--Schopenhauer
