Life poems
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The Solitarys Wine
© Charles Baudelaire
A flirtatious womans singular gaze
as she slithers towards you, like the white rays
the vibrant moon throws on the trembling sea
where she wishes to bathe her casual beauty,
If The Advertising Man Had Been Praed, Or Locker
© Franklin Pierce Adams
"C'est distingue," says Madame La Mode.
Subtly distinctive as a fabric fair;
Nor Keats nor Shelley in his loftiest ode
Could thrum the line to tell how it will wear.
Rural Elegance, An Ode to the Late Duchess of Somerset
© William Shenstone
While orient skies restore the day,
And dew-drops catch the lucid ray;
Amid the sprightly scenes of morn
Will aught the Muse inspire?
Oh! peace to yonder clamorous horn
That drowns the sacred lyre!
The Two Dreams
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
I WILL that if I say a heavy thing
Your tongues forgive me; seeing ye know that spring
Beyond The Shadow
© Augusta Davies Webster
SOME quick kind tears, some easy sorrow,
And then 'tis past.
'Twas sad; yet sadness has its morrow;
Blue skies succeed skies overcast:
Why should grief last?
King David
© Stephen Vincent Benet
David sang to his hook-nosed harp:
"The Lord God is a jealous God!
His violent vengeance is swift and sharp!
And the Lord is King above all gods!
The Glen of Arrawatta
© Henry Kendall
A tale of Love and Death. And shall I say
A tale of love in deathfor all the patient eyes
That gathered darkness, watching for a son
And brother, never dreaming of the fate
The fearful fate he met alone, unknown,
Within the ruthless Australasian wastes?
British Association, Notes Of The President's Address
© James Clerk Maxwell
In the very beginnings of science, the parsons, who managed things then,
Being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men;
The Conjunction Of Jupiter And Venus
© William Cullen Bryant
I would not always reason. The straight path
Wearies us with its never-varying lines,
The Courtship Of Young John
© Alice Guerin Crist
But he little knew what a treasure hed won.
What a wonderful life had just begun;
And how bright the sunshine that lay upon
The future pathway of that young John.
Seeing the Eclipse in Maine by Robert Bly: American Life in Poetry #165 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
In âThe Moose,â? a poem much too long to print here, the late Elizabeth Bishop was able to show a community being created from a group of strangers on a bus who come in contact with a moose on the highway. They watch it together and become one. Here Robert Bly of Minnesota assembles a similar community, around an eclipse. Notice how the experience happens to âwe,â? the group, not just to âme,â? the poet.
Seeing the Eclipse in Maine
It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,
We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard
And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun
Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.
The Currency Lass
© Roderic Quinn
THEY marshalled her lovers four and four,
A drum at their heads, in the days of old:
O, none could have guessed their hearts were sore;
They marched with such gayness in scarlet and gold.
Bach in the DC Subway by David Lee Garrison : American Life in Poetry #239 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Lau
© Ted Kooser
It’s likely that if you found the original handwritten manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, “The Waste Land,” you wouldn’t be able to trade it for a candy bar at the Quick Shop on your corner. Here’s a poem by David Lee Garrison of Ohio about how unsuccessfully classical music fits into a subway.
Bach in the DC Subway
As an experiment,
Longfellow Dead
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
AY, it is well! Crush back your selfish tears;
For from the half-veiled face of earthly spring
Hath he not risen on heaven-aspiring wing
To reach the spring-tide of the eternal years?
Before Execution.
© Robert Crawford
The sun is set, and all the stars are come,
Stars I shall no more see; the air is still,
And my life waits the ruin so near now.
A little space, and I shall have done here.
How Can I Keep From Singing?
© Robert Wadsworth Lowry
My life flows on in endless song;
Above earths lamentation
The Soul That Loves God Finds Him Everywhere
© William Cowper
O thou, by long experience tried,
Near whom no grief can long abide;
My love! how full of sweet content
I pass my years of banishment!
Drake
© Alfred Noyes
England, my mother,
Lift to my western sweetheart
One full cup of English mead, breathing of the may!
Pledge the may-flower in her face that you and ah, none other,
Sent her from the mother-land
Across the dashing spray.
Solomon
© Thomas Parnell
But long expectance of a bliss delay'd
Breeds anxious doubt, and tempts the sacred maid;
Then mists arising strait repel the light,
The colour'd garden lies disguis'd with night,
A pale-horn'd crescent leads a glimm'ring throng,
And groans of absence jarr within the song.
