Life poems
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Beauty that Is Never Old
© James Weldon Johnson
When buffeted and beaten by life's storms,
When by the bitter cares of life oppressed,
I want no surer haven than your arms,
I want no sweeter heaven than your breast.
Pauline Barrett
© Edgar Lee Masters
Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon's knife!
And almost a year to creep back into strength,
Till the dawn of our wedding decennial
Found me my seeming self again.
The Shepheardes Calender: Januarie
© Edmund Spenser
A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)
when Winters wastful spight was almost spent,
All in a sunneshine day, as did befall,
Led forth his flock, that had been long ypent.
So faynt they woxe, and feeble in the folde,
That now vnnethes their feete could them vphold.
The Spooniad
© Edgar Lee Masters
[The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for the first time published in Reedy's Mirror of December 18th, 1914.]
Of John Cabanis' wrath and of the strife
Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
Who led the common people in the cause
William H. Herndon
© Edgar Lee Masters
There by the window in the old house
Perched on the bluff, overlooking miles of valley,
My days of labor closed, sitting out life's decline,
Day by day did I look in my memory,
Le Roy Goldman
© Edgar Lee Masters
"What will you do when you come to die,
If all your life long you have rejected Jesus,
And know as you lie there, He is not your friend?"
Over and over I said, I, the revivalist.
The Widow of Nain
© George MacDonald
Forth from the city, with the load
That makes the trampling low,
They walk along the dreary road
That dust and ashes go.
Jonathan Swift Somers
© Edgar Lee Masters
After you have enriched your soul
To the highest point,
With books, thought, suffering, the understanding of many personalities,
The power to interpret glances, silences,
Benjamin Painter
© Edgar Lee Masters
Together in this grave lie Benjamin Painter, attorney at law,
And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend.
Down the grey road, friends, children, men and women,
Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone
Indignation Jones
© Edgar Lee Masters
You would not believe, would you
That I came from good Welsh stock?
That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders
Aaron Hatfield
© Edgar Lee Masters
Better than granite, Spoon River,
Is the memory-picture you keep of me
Standing before the pioneer men and women
There at Concord Church on Communion day.
Lilian Stewart
© Edgar Lee Masters
I was the daughter of Lambert Hutchins,
Born in a cottage near the grist-mill,
Reared in the mansion there on the hill,
With its spires, bay-windows, and roof of slate.
Russian Sonia
© Edgar Lee Masters
I, born in Weimar
Of a mother who was French
And German father, a most learned professor,
Orphaned at fourteen years,
Mrs. Kessler
© Edgar Lee Masters
Mr Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
Or sat at home reading Grant's Memoirs;
Sonnet XLVIII: Death-in-Love
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
There came an image in Life's retinue
That had Love's wings and bore his gonfalon:
Barney Hainsfeather
© Edgar Lee Masters
If the excursion train to Peoria
Had just been wrecked, I might have escaped with my life --
Certainly I should have escaped this place.
But as it was burned as well, they mistook me
The Edge
© Lola Ridge
As the night grew
The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth
Fell in ashen folds about the hills,
Like hooded virgins, pulling their cloaks about them…
There must have been a spent moon,
For the Tall One's veil held a shimmer of silver…
Flossie Cabanis
© Edgar Lee Masters
From Bindle's opera house in the village
To Broadway is a great step.
But I tried to take it, my ambition fired
When sixteen years of age,
Editor Whedon
© Edgar Lee Masters
To be able to see every side of every question;
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
To use great feelings and passions of the human family
