Life poems

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And whoso reads may get him some shrewd skill;
And some unprofitable scorn resign,
To praise the very thing that he deplores;
So, friends (dear friends), remember, if you will,
The shame I win for singing is all mine,
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours.

Her Eyes

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

Up from the street and the crowds that went,
Morning and midnight, to and fro,
Still was the room where his days he spent,
And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow.

Ballad of Dead Friends

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.

Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass's head in Fairyland
As he would add a shilling to more shillings,

Octaves

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

I We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel --

The Garden

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

My life! Ah, yes, there was my life, indeed!
And there were all the lives of humankind;
And they were like a book that I could read,
Whose every leaf, miraculously signed,
Outrolled itself from Thoughts eternal seed.
Love-rooted in Gods garden of the mind.

Supremacy

© Edwin Arlington Robinson

But as I went majestic on my way,
Into the dark they vanished, one by one,
Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day,
The dream of all my glory was undone,--
And, with a fool's importunate dismay,
I heard the dead men singing in the sun.

The Deserted Village

© Oliver Goldsmith

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.

The Wife of the Mind

© Charles Webb

Sharecroppers' child, she was more schooled
In slaughtering pigs and coaxing corn out of
The ground than in the laws of Math, the rules
Of Grammar. Seventeen, she fell in love

Post-Vacation Tristesse

© Charles Webb

The Jumbo Jet has barely shuddered off
The ground, and I'm depressed. My scuba mask
And fins, my fly rod and beach hat

To A Sad Daughter

© Michael Ondaatje

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.

To the Memory of Henry Welles Livingston

© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.

A gentle spirit now above
Once animated what lies here
Till heav'n announc'd in tenderest love
"Ascend Immortal to yon sphere."

To the Memory of Sarah Livingston

© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.

BEYOND where billows roll or tempests vex
Is gone the gentlest of the gentle sex!
---Her brittle bark on life's wild ocean tost
Unequal to the conflict soon was lost.

On my Sister Joanna's Entrance into Her 33rd Year

© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.

On this thy natal day permit a friend -
A brother - with thy joys his own to blend:
In all gladness he would wish to share
As willing in thy griefs a part to bear.

Apostrophe

Of RISPAH. (who had been the concubine of King SAUL) when DAVID hanged her children, because their father had done amiss.
From morn to eve from eve to rosy morn,
On this bleak rock I'll lay me all forlorn;
Here will I stay, tho' tempests frown around,

An Elegy on the Death of Montgomery Tappen

The sweetest, gentlest, of the youthful train,
Here lies his clay cold upon the sable bier!
He scarce had started on life's varied plain,
For dreary death arrested his career.

Britannia's Pastorals

Now as an angler melancholy standing
Upon a green bank yielding room for landing,
A wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook,
Now in the midst he throws, then in a nook:

The Lonely God

So Eden was deserted, and at eve
Into the quiet place God came to grieve.
His face was sad, His hands hung slackly down
Along his robe; too sorrowful to frown

The Bistro Styx

© Rita Dove

She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness
as she paused just inside the double
glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape
billowing dramatically behind her.What's this,