Life poems
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Songs of the Voices of Birds: A Poet in his Youth, and the Cuckoo-Bird
© Jean Ingelow
“O, I hear thee in the blue;
Would that I might wing it too!
O to have what hope hath seen!
O to be what might have been!
Wall, Cave, And Pillar Statements, After Asoka
© Alan Dugan
In order to perfect all readers
the statements should he carved
Joy And Duty
© Henry Van Dyke
Joy is a Duty,so with golden lore
The Hebrew rabbis taught in days of yore,
Folk Singer's Blues
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
Well, I'd like to sing a song about the chain gang
And swingin' twelve pound hammers all the day,
And how a I'd like to kill my captain
And how a black man works his life away, but...
Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight
© Robert Frost
When I spread out my hand here today,
I catch no more than a ray
To feel of between thumb and fingers;
No lasting effect of it lingers.
Bring Them Not Back
© James Benjamin Kenyon
Yet, O my friendpale conjurer, I call
Thee friendbring, bring the dead not back again,
By a Bier-Side
© John Masefield
Beauty was in this brain and in this eager hand:
Death is so blind and dumb Death does not understand.
Death drifts the brain with dust and soils the young limbs' glory,
Death makes justice a dream, and strength a traveller's story.
Death drives the lovely soul to wander under the sky.
Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.
Two Look at Two
© Robert Frost
Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
A Peck of Gold
© Robert Frost
Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.
Eavesdropping
© Katharine Lee Bates
THOUGH the winds but stir on their hoary thrones
Of hemlock and pungent pine,
To A Derelict
© Robert Laurence Binyon
O travelled far beyond unhappiness
Into a dreadful peace!
Why tarriest thou here? The street is bright
With noon; the music of the tidal sound
What We Need by Jo McDougall: American Life in Poetry #55 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
A circus is an assemblage of illusions, and here Jo McDougall, a Kansas poet, shows us a couple of performers, drab and weary in their ordinary lives, away from the lights at the center of the ring.
What We Need
The Star Sirius
© George Meredith
Bright Sirius! that when Orion pales
To dotlings under moonlight still art keen
To Count Carlo Pepoli
© Giacomo Leopardi
This wearisome and this distressing sleep
That we call life, O how dost thou support,
The White Peacock
© Stephen Vincent Benet
Go away!
Go away; I will not confess to you!
His black biretta clings like a hangman's cap; under his twitching fingers the beads shiver and click,
As he mumbles in his corner, the shadow deepens upon him;
I will not confess! . . .
With A Guitar, To Jane
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ariel to Miranda:-- Take
This slave of music, for the sake
Of him who is the slave of thee;
And teach it all the harmony
The Borough. Letter XXII: Peter Grimes
© George Crabbe
Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarr'd
From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;
Hard that he could not every wish obey,
But must awhile relinquish ale and play;
Hard! that he could not to his cards attend,
But must acquire the money he would spend.
