Life poems
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Voices Of The Night : The Beleaguered City
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I have read, in some old, marvellous tale,
Some legend strange and vague,
That a midnight host of spectres pale
Beleaguered the walls of Prague.
The Jedge Of Bowie County
© Edgar Albert Guest
He was Jedge of Bowie county, jedge fer cullud an' fer white folk,
Whar he learned the ways of people, learned the wrong folk an' the right folk,
An' his heart grew big with kindness fer the ones who came with sad things
An' his face grew round with smilin' at the ones who came with glad things.
Fer the Jedge of Bowie county all his early days was storin'
Up the laughter of old Texas that should set us all a-roarin.'
In My Sky At Twilight
© Pablo Neruda
In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your form and colour are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.
On The Death Of W. C.
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Thou arrant robber, Death!
Couldst thou not find
Some lesser one than he
To rob of breath,--
Some poorer mind
Thy prey to be?
The Pierrot Of The Minute
© Ernest Christopher Dowson
_A glade in the Parc due Petit Trianon. In the centre a Doric temple with
steps coming down the stage. On the left a little Cupid on a pedestal.
Twilight._
In Egypt.
© Robert Crawford
Speak softly, wake her not! We all must die.
This is a sleep that wraps her in secure
From Caesar's luck. Yet is that veiny bosom
Warm where now love's despair wrought life's undoing,
Ode To a Young Lady
© John Logan
Maria, bright with beauty's glow,
In conscious gayety you go
The pride of all the park:
Attracted groups in silence gaze
And soft behind you hear the praise,
And whisper of the spark.
Old Dwarf Heart
© Anne Sexton
True. All too true. I have never been at home in
life. All my decay has taken place upon a child.
Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
To The Beloved
© Alice Meynell
Oh, not more subtly silence strays
Amongst the winds, between the voices,
Mingling alike with pensive lays,
And with the music that rejoices,
Than thou art present in my days.
Columbus Park by Anne Pierson Wiese: American Life in Poetry #130 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 200
© Ted Kooser
A number of American poets are adept at describing places and the people who inhabit them. Galway Kinnell's great poem, âThe Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New Worldâ? is one of those masterpieces, and there are many others. Here Anne Pierson Wiese, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, adds to that tradition.
An Old Colonists Reverie
© David McKee Wright
Dustily over the highway pipes the loud nor'-wester at morn,
Wind and the rising sun, and waving tussock and corn;
It brings to me days gone by when first in my ears it rang,
The wind is the voice of my home, and I think of the songs it sang
When, fresh from the desk and ledger, I crossed the long leagues of sea -
"The old worn world is gone and the new bright world is free."
Eclogue the Fourth Agib
© William Taylor Collins
In vain Circassia boasts her spicy groves,
For ever famed for pure and happy loves;
In vain she boasts her fairest of the fair,
Their eyes' blue languish and their golden hair!
Those eyes in tears their fruitless grief must send;
Those hairs the Tartar's cruel hand shall rend.
This Life.
© Robert Crawford
This life that glides away
As in a night and day
This that is shade and shine from Night brought forth
To Night returning on a cloudy wing,
The World
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair:
But all night as the moon so changeth she;
The Ballad of the Elder Son
© Henry Lawson
A son of elder sons I am,
Whose boyhood days were cramped and scant,
On Circuit
© Horace Smith
Two neighbours, fighting for a yard of land;
Two witnesses, who _lie_ on either hand;
Wollongong
© Henry Kendall
Let me talk of years evanished, let me harp upon the time
When we trod these sands together, in our boyhood's golden prime;
Life's Eden.
© Robert Crawford
'Tis in sooth life's Eden,
We within it;
Love put all the seed in
To begin it,
Continent's End
© Robinson Jeffers
At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed
with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the
ground-swell shook the beds of granite.
