Life poems
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To The Earl Of Clare
© George Gordon Byron
The recollectlon seems alone
Dearer than all the joys I've known,
When distant far from you:
Though pain, 'tis still a pleasing pain,
To trace those days and hours again,
And sigh again, adieu!
A Voice From The Factories
© Caroline Norton
WHEN fallen man from Paradise was driven,
Forth to a world of labour, death, and care;
Still, of his native Eden, bounteous Heaven
Resolved one brief memorial to spare,
Alexis And Dora
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
FARTHER and farther away, alas! at each moment the vessel
Hastens, as onward it glides, cleaving the foam-cover'd flood!
"I Love You Sweatheart"
© Thomas Lux
A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
Upon Watts' Picture Sic Transit
© John McCrae
But yesterday the tourney, all the eager joy of life,
The waving of the banners, and the rattle of the spears,
The clash of sword and harness, and the madness of the strife;
To-night begin the silence and the peace of endless years.
Unsolved
© John McCrae
Amid my books I lived the hurrying years,
Disdaining kinship with my fellow man;
Alike to me were human smiles and tears,
I cared not whither Earth's great life-stream ran,
Sonnet XXVII: Oft and In Vain
© Samuel Daniel
Oft and in vain my rebel thoughts have ventur'd
To stop the passage of my vanquisht heart,
The Warrior
© John McCrae
Or in the stifling 'tween decks, row on row,
At Aboukir, saw how the dead men lay;
Charged with the fiercest in Busaco's strife,
Brave dreams are his -- the flick'ring lamp burns low --
Yet couraged for the battles of the day
He goes to stand full face to face with life.
Victoria
© Alfred Austin
The lark went up, the mower whet his scythe,
On golden meads kine ruminating lay,
And all the world felt young again and blithe,
Just as to-day.
Song Of Songs
© Wilfred Owen
Sing me at morn but only with your laugh;
Even as Spring that laugheth into leaf;
Even as Love that laugheth after Life.
The Pilgrims
© John McCrae
An uphill path, sun-gleams between the showers,
Where every beam that broke the leaden sky
Lit other hills with fairer ways than ours;
Some clustered graves where half our memories lie;
And one grim Shadow creeping ever nigh:
And this was Life.
Song of the Stars
© William Cullen Bryant
"Away, away, through the wide, wide sky, -
The fair blue fields that before us lie, -
Each sun with the worlds that round him roll,
Each planet poised on her turning pole;
With her isles of green and her clouds of white,
And her waters that lie like fluid light.
Slumber Songs
© John McCrae
Sleep, little eyes
That brim with childish tears amid thy play,
Be comforted! No grief of night can weigh
Against the joys that throng thy coming day.
Recompense
© John McCrae
Ere harvest time, upon earth's peaceful breast
Each laid him down among the unreaping dead.
"Labour hath other recompense than rest,
Else were the toiler like the fool," I said;
"God meteth him not less, but rather more
Because he sowed and others reaped his store."
Penance
© John McCrae
My lover died a century ago,
Her dear heart stricken by my sland'rous breath,
Wherefore the Gods forbade that I should know
The peace of death.
But the Greatest of These is Charity
© George Essex Evans
Give: we are pawns upon the board;
We see not how Fates dice are thrown.
The life swung by a trembling cord
Might be your own.
Mine Host
© John McCrae
Within sit haggard men that speak no word,
No fire gleams their cheerful welcome shed;
No voice of fellowship or strife is heard
But silence of a multitude of dead.
"Naught can I offer ye," quoth Death, "but rest!"
And to his chamber leads each tired guest.
In Due Season
© John McCrae
If night should come and find me at my toil,
When all Life's day I had, tho' faintly, wrought,
And shallow furrows, cleft in stony soil
Were all my labour: Shall I count it naught
Sic Vos Non Vobis
© Ada Cambridge
Ye, that the untrod paths have braved,
With heart and brain unbound;
