Life poems
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Sonnet I: I Thought Once How Theocritus
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
The Ploughman's Life
© Robert Burns
As I was a-wand'ring ae morning in spring,
I heard a young ploughman sae sweetly to sing;
And as he was singin', thir words he did say, -
There's nae life like the ploughman's in the month o' sweet May.
The Bangle Sellers
© Sarojini Naidu
Bangle sellers are we who bear
Our shining loads to the temple fair...
Who will buy these delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light?
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.
The Character Of A Happy Life
© Sir Henry Wotton
How happy is he born or taught,
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his highest skill;
Leonora
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
LEONORA, Leonora,
How the word rolls--Leonora--
Lion-like, in full-mouthed sound,
Marching o'er the metric ground
Happiness of a Country Life
© James Thomson
Oh! knew he but his happiness, of men
The happiest he, who, far from public rage,
Alfred And Janet
© Robert Bloomfield
At thirteen she was all that Heaven could send,
My nurse, my faithful clerk, my lively friend;
Last at my pillow when I sunk to sleep,
First on my threshold soon as day could peep:
I heard her happy to her heart's desire,
With clanking pattens, and a roaring fire.
Griselda: A Society Novel In Verse - Chapter III
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
How long they sat thus silent who shall say?
Griselda knew not. Time was far away;
She wanted courage to prepare her heart
For that last bitterest word of all, ``We part.''
And he cared naught for time. His Heaven was there,
Nor needed thought, nor speech, nor even prayer.
Young Man by John Haines: American Life in Poetry #95 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Literature, and in this instance, poetry, holds a mirror to life; thus the great themes of life become the great themes of poems. Here the distinguished American poet, John Haines, addresses—and celebrates through the affirmation of poetry—our preoccupation with aging and mortality.
To The Negotiations In Kabul
© Joseph Brodsky
You, the brutal-hearted sky-scraping mountain tribes!
Lamb and horseflesh - is all your menu describes;
Long beards and handcrafted rugs, your loud guttural names;
Never before have seen a sea, not to mention a piano - in your eyes.
Weak Is The Will Of Man, His Judgement Blind
© William Wordsworth
'WEAK is the will of Man, his judgment blind;
'Remembrance persecutes, and Hope betrays;
'Heavy is woe;--and joy, for human-kind,
'A mournful thing, so transient is the blaze!'
The Purple Thread
© Katharine Lee Bates
"The priests distributed various coloured silken threads to weave for the veil of the sanctuary; and it fell to Mary's lot to weave purple."
The Book of the Bee, ch. XXXIV.
The Washers of the Shroud
© James Russell Lowell
Along a riverside, I know not where,
I walked one night in mystery of dream;
A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,
To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam
Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.
Tekel
© Edith Nesbit
WHEN on the West broke light from out the East,
Then from the splendour and the shame of Rome--
The Oldest Inhabitant
© Augusta Davies Webster
"AND when came I to this town?" did he say!
A question asked for the asking's sake,
"Up! Everything that God has made"
© Hans Adolph Brorson
Up! Everything that God has made,
His glory now be praising,
The smallest creature too is great,
And proves his might amazing.
The Irish Emigrants Mother
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
"Oh! come, my mother, come away, across the sea-green water;
Oh! come with me, and come with him, the husband of thy daughter;
Oh! come with us, and come with them, the sister and the brother,
Who, prattling climb thy ag'ed knees, and call thy daughter-mother.
The Bushmans Lullaby
© Rolf Boldrewood
Lift me down to the creek bank, Jack,
It must be fresher outside;
The long hot day is well nigh done;
Its a chance if I see another one;
I should like to look on the setting sun,
And the water, cool and wide.
Ode To Naples
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
EPODE 1a.
I stood within the City disinterred;
And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls
Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
Edith: A Tale Of The Woods
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Thou'rt passing from the lake's green side,
And the hunter's hearth away;
For the time of flowers, for the summer's pride,
Daughter! thou canst not stay.
