Life poems
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Second Sunday In Lent
© John Keble
"And is there in God's world so drear a place
Where the loud bitter cry is raised in vain?
Where tears of penance come too late for grace,
As on the uprooted flower the genial rain?"
Euthanasia
© George Gordon Byron
When Time, or soon or late, shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Oblivion! may thy languid wing
Wave gently o'er my dying bed!
To The Soldiers Of Pius Ninth
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
Warriors true, tis no false glory
For which now you peril life,
Language Lessons by Alexandra Teague : American Life in Poetry #223 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
© Ted Kooser
There's lots of literature about the loss of innocence, because we all share in that loss and literature is about what we share. Here's a poem by Alexandra Teague, a San Franciscan, in which a child's awakening to the alphabet coincides with another awakening: the unsettling knowledge that all of us don't see things in the same way.
Language Lessons
The carpet in the kindergarten room
The Avenging Spirit
© Arthur Symons
So you have drugged me with this poisoned wine
Because I never loved you; trees writhe grim
The Lotus-Flower
© Roderic Quinn
All the heights of the high shores gleam
Red and gold at the sunset hour:
There comes the spell of a magic dream,
And the Harbour seems a lotus-flower;
At The Gate
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Within, what new life waits me! Little ease,
Cold lying, hunger, nights of wakefulness,
Harsh orders given, no voice to soothe or please,
Poor thieves for friends, for books rules meaningless;
This is the grave--nay, Hell. Yet, Lord of Might,
Still in Thy light my spirit shall see light.
The Olde, Olde, very Olde Man; or The Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr
© John Taylor
Good wholesome labour was his exercise,
Down with the lamb, and with the lark would rise:
In mire and toiling sweat he spent the day,
And to his team he whistled time away:
Biography
© John Masefield
Yet when I am dust my penman may not know
Those water-trampling ships which made me glow,
But think my wonder mad and fail to find,
Their glory, even dimly, from my mind,
And yet they made me:
Sonnett - VIII
© James Russell Lowell
TO M.W., ON HER BIRTHDAY
Maiden, when such a soul as thine is born,
Song Of The Trees
© Mary Colborne-Veel
We are the Trees.
On us the dying rest
Their strange, sad eyes, in farewell messages.
And we, his comrades still, since earth began,
Wave mournful boughs above the grave of man,
And coffin his cold breast.
Out Of Pompeii
© William Wilfred Campbell
She lay, face downward, on her beaded arm,
In this her new, sweet dream of human bliss,
Her heart within her fearful, fluttering, warm,
Her lips yet pained with love's first timorous kiss.
The Glory Of The Heavens
© Emile Verhaeren
Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies
Behind the veil that the finger of radiant winter weaves
And down on us falls the foliage of stars in glittering sheaves;
From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies,
The Angel In The House. Book I. Canto III.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
IV The Attainment
You love? That's high as you shall go;
For 'tis as true as Gospel text,
Not noble then is never so,
Either in this world or the next.
With Scindia To Delhi
© Rudyard Kipling
More than a hundred years ago, in a great battle fought near Delhi,
an Indian Prince rode fifty miles after the day was lost
with a beggar-girl, who had loved him and followed him in all his camps,
on his saddle-bow. He lost the girl when almost within sight of safety.
A Maratta trooper tells the story: -
Upon The Image Of Death
© Robert Southwell
Before my face the picture hangs
That daily should put me in mind
Of those cold names and bitter pangs
That shortly I am like to find;
But yet, alas, full little I
Do think hereon that I must die.
"Let Us Make A Leap, My Dear"
© Thomas Hood
Let us make a leap, my dear,
In our love, of many a year,
And date it very far away,
On a bright clear summer day,
A Parting
© Edith Nesbit
So good-bye!
This is where we end it, you and I.
Life's to live, you know, and death's to die;
So good-bye!
