Life poems
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Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
See, it is ended. Sick and overborne
By foes and fools, and my long chase, I lie.
Here, in these walls, with all life's souls forlorn
Herded I wait,--and in my ears the cry,
``Alas, poor brothers, equal in Man's scorn
And free in God's good liberty to die.''
The Task: Book V. -- The Winter Morning Walk
© William Cowper
Tis morning; and the sun, with ruddy orb
Ascending, fires the horizon; while the clouds,
Ode, Written in a Visit to the Country in Autumn
© John Logan
'Tis past! no more the Summer blooms!
Ascending in the rear,
Morning
© John Keble
Hues of the rich unfolding morn,
That, ere the glorious sun be born,
By some soft touch invisible
Around his path are taught to swell; -
The Greek At Constantinople
© Richard Monckton Milnes
The cypresses of Scutari
In stern magnificence look down
On the bright lake and stream of sea,
And glittering theatre of town:
Bon Voyage - And Vice Versa
© Franklin Pierce Adams
Ah, canst thou bear the surging deep?
Canst thou endure the hard ship's-mattress?
For scant will be thy hours of sleep
From Staten Island to Cape Hatt'ras;
And won't thy fairy feet be froze
With treading on the foreign snows?
The Suicide's Argument
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no
No question was asked me--it could not be so!
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try
And to live on be YES; what can NO be? to die.
One Day And Another: A Lyrical Eclogue - Inscription
© Madison Julius Cawein
TO
G. F. M.
THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED IN MEMORY
OF MANY DAYS.
Breitmann As An Uhlan. III. Breitmann And Bouilli.
© Charles Godfrey Leland
Vot roombles down de Bergstrass?
Vot a grash ish in de air!
Mit a desberate gonfusion,
Und a gry of wild tespair,
O sleep, my babe
© Sara Coleridge
O sleep, my babe, hear not the rippling wave,
Nor feel the breeze that round thee ling'ring strays
Lot In Sodom
© John Newton
How hurtful was the choice of Lot,
Who took up his abode
Because it was a fruitful spot
With them who feared not God!
An Anemone
© Madison Julius Cawein
"Teach me the wisdom of thy beauty, pray,
That, being thus wise, I may aspire to see
What beauty is, whence, why, and in what way
Immortal, yet how mortal utterly:
For, shrinking loveliness, thy brow of day
Pleads plaintive as a prayer, anemone.
What My Father Left Behind by Chris Forhan: American Life in Poetry #200 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laure
© Ted Kooser
Here's a fine poem by Chris Forhan of Indiana, about surviving the loss of a parent, and which celebrates the lives that survive it, that go on. I especially like the parachute floating up and away, just as the lost father has gone up and away.
What My Father Left Behind
Jam jar of cigarette ends and ashes on his workbench,
hammer he nailed our address to a stump with,
balsa wood steamship, half-finishedâ
Elegy on the Death of a Frog
© David Lewis
Ya summer day when I were mowin',
When flooers of monny soorts were growin',
Which fast befoor my scythe fell bowin',
As I advance,
A frog I cut widout my knowin'-
A sad mischance.
Girl Child
© Stephen Vincent Benet
To this child,
To all swift children,
My great thanks
For their clear honor,
The hound running,
The flying fire.
"The Rock" In El Ghor
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Dead Petra in her hill-tomb sleeps,
Her stones of emptiness remain;
Around her sculptured mystery sweeps
The lonely waste of Edom's plain.
Before a Painting
© James Weldon Johnson
And over me the sense of beauty fell,
As music over a raptured listener to
The deep-voiced organ breathing out a hymn;
Or as on one who kneels, his beads to tell,
There falls the aureate glory filtered through
The windows in some old cathedral dim.
