Life poems
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Captain Orlando Killion
© Edgar Lee Masters
Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,
You dauntless fledglings
Who pass by my headstone,
Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army
William and Emily
© Edgar Lee Masters
There is something about Death
Like love itself!
If with some one with whom you have known passion,
And the glow of youthful love,
The Life Beyond
© Rupert Brooke
He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Tom Beatty
© Edgar Lee Masters
I was a lawyer like Harmon Whitney
Or Kinsey Keene or Garrison Standard,
For I tried the rights of property,
Although by lamp-light, for thirty years,
Minerva Jones
© Edgar Lee Masters
I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when "Butch" Weldy
The Treasure
© Robinson Jeffers
Mountains, a moment's earth-waves rising and hollowing; the
earth too's an ephemerid; the stars-
Bacchanalia or The New Age
© Matthew Arnold
The world but feels the present's spell,
The poet feels the past as well;
Whatever men have done, might do,
Whatever thought, might think it too.
Abel Melveny
© Edgar Lee Masters
I bought every kind of machine that's known --
Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers --
And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
Plymouth Rock Joe
© Edgar Lee Masters
Why are you running so fast hither and thither
Chasing midges or butterflies?
Some of you are standing solemnly scratching for grubs;
Some of you are waiting for corn to be scattered.
The Crucible Of Life
© Edgar Albert Guest
Sunshine and shadow, blue sky and gray,
Laughter and tears as we tread on our way;
Hearts that are heavy, then hearts that are light,
Eyes that are misty and eyes that are bright;
Losses and gains in the heat of the strife,
Each in proportion to round out his life.
Elizabeth Childers
© Edgar Lee Masters
Dust of my dust,
And dust with my dust,
O, child who died as you entered the world,
Dead with my death!
Louise Smith
© Edgar Lee Masters
Herbert broke our engagement of eight years
When Annabelle returned to the village
From the Seminary, ah me!
If I had let my love for him alone
Anne Rutledge
© Edgar Lee Masters
Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
'With malice toward none, with charity for all.'
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
Clarence Darrow
© Edgar Lee Masters
This is Darrow,
Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart,
And his drawl, and his infinite paradox
And his sadness, and kindness,
And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life
To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.
Margaret Fuller Slack
© Edgar Lee Masters
I would have been as great as George Eliot
But for an untoward fate.
For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit,
Chin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes --
Consolation
© Charles Harpur
MINE heart is heavy with an ancient sorrow,
My brain is aching with a clinging grief,
Julian Scott
© Edgar Lee Masters
Toward the last
The truth of others was untruth to me;
The justice of others injustice to me;
Their reasons for death, reasons with me for life;
Amanda Barker
© Edgar Lee Masters
Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Cassius Hueffer
© Edgar Lee Masters
They have chiseled on my stone the words:
'His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.'
