Life poems
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But One Talent
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Ye who yourselves of larger worth esteem
Than common mortals, listen to my dream,
and learn the lesson of life's cozening cheat,
The coinage of conceit.
The Living Temple
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
NOT in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
The Iron Gate
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
WHERE is this patriarch you are kindly greeting?
Not unfamiliar to my ear his name,
Nor yet unknown to many a joyous meeting
In days long vanished,-- is he still the same,
Long Years Have Past Since Last I Stood
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
LONG years have past since last I stood
Alone amid this mountain scene,
Unlike the future which I dreamed,
How like my future it has been!
Bill and Joe
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
COME, dear old comrade, you and I
Will steal an hour from days gone by,
The shining days when life was new,
And all was bright with morning dew,
The lusty days of long ago,
When you were Bill and I was Joe.
The Silent Melody
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
"BRING me my broken harp," he said;
"We both are wrecks,-- but as ye will,--
Though all its ringing tones have fled,
Their echoes linger round it still;
It had some golden strings, I know,
But that was long-- how long!-- ago.
Under the Violets
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
HER hands are cold; her face is white;
No more her pulses come and go;
Her eyes are shut to life and light;--
Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
And lay her where the violets blow.
The Three Silences Of Molinos
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Three Silences there are: the first of speech,
The second of desire, the third of thought;
The Two Streams
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends, --
AN ELEGY Upon the most Incomparable K. Charles the First
© Henry King
Call for amazed thoughts, a wounded sense
And bleeding Hearts at our Intelligence.
Call for that Trump of Death the Mandrakes Groan
Which kills the Hearers: This befits alone
Hellas
© Oscar Wilde
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
To-Morrow
© George MacDonald
My TO-MORROW is but a flitting
Fancy of the brain;
God's TO-MORROW an angel sitting,
Ready for joy or pain.
The Boys
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
HAS there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has, take him out, without making a noise.
Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
Old Time is a liar! We're twenty to-night!
A Parody on A Psalm of Life
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is real, life is earnest,
And the shell is not its pen
Egg thou art, and egg remainest
Was not spoken of the hen.
The Chambered Nautilus
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,--
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
New Zealand
© William Pember Reeves
GOD girt her about with the surges
And winds of the masterless deep,
The Old Man Dreams
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
OH for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I'd rather laugh, a bright-haired boy,
Than reign, a gray-beard king.
Summer Images
© John Clare
Now swarthy Summer, by rude health embrowned,
Precedence takes of rosy fingered Spring;
August Morning by Albert Garcia: American Life in Poetry #71 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
William Carlos Williams, one of our country's most influential poets and a New Jersey physician, taught us to celebrate daily life. Here Albert Garcia offers us the simple pleasures and modest mysteries of a single summer day.
