Life poems
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Home Burial
© Robert Frost
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
The Other World
© Harriet Beecher Stowe
It lies around us like a cloud,
A world we do not see;
Yet the sweet closing of an eye
May bring us there to be.
A Question.
© Arthur Henry Adams
AND so in the death-darkened chamber they met,
The woman that once he had loved and the one he loved yet
The wife who had warped his desire and the woman he could not forget.
They stood by the bier where between them he slept,
Invita Minerva
© James Russell Lowell
The Bardling came where by a river grew
The pennoned reeds, that, as the west-wind blew,
Gleamed and sighed plaintively, as if they knew
What music slept enchanted in each stem,
Till Pan should choose some happy one of them,
And with wise lips enlife it through and through.
The Daft-days
© Robert Fergusson
Now mirk December's dowie face
Glours our the rigs wi' sour grimace,
While, thro' his minimum of space,
The bleer-ey'd sun
Wi' blinkin light and stealing pace,
His race doth run.
Two Tramps In Mud Time
© Robert Frost
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.
Bereft
© Robert Frost
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Birches
© Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
'Out, Out--'
© Robert Frost
The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Jericho; or, The Waters Healed
© John Newton
Though Jericho pleasantly stood,
And looked like a promising soil;
The Dead Child And The Mocking-Bird
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
ONCE in a land of balm and flowers,
Of rich fruit-laden trees,
Where the wild wreaths from jasmine bowers
Trail o'er Floridian seas;
Our Men
© William Watson
Our men, they are our stronghold,
Our bastioned wall unscaled,
Who, against Hate and Wrong, hold
This Realm that never quailed;
Sonnet III "Life Ever Seems as from Its Present Site"
© Henry Timrod
Life ever seems as from its present site
It aimed to lure us. Mountains of the past
Dead Man's Dump
© Isaac Rosenberg
The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.
Filthy Savior
© Laure-Anne Bosselaar
there it goes, letting the wind
push it, suck it into a cloud; then its
gone like some vague, inhuman
longing as the rain lifts, and the suburbs
emerge in dirty white light.
Water
© Wendell Berry
I was born in a drouth year. That summer
my mother waited in the house, enclosed
in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind,
for the men to come back in the evenings,
Sonnet Written Among The Ruins Of The Castle At Heidelberg
© Frances Anne Kemble
Weep'st thou to see the ruin and decay
Which Time doth wreak upon earth's mighty things?
The Wish to be Generous
© Wendell Berry
ALL that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
The Miner
© James Russell Lowell
Down 'mid the tangled roots of things
That coil about the central fire,
I seek for that which giveth wings
To stoop, not soar, to my desire.
