Life poems
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Grandpa Vogt’s—1959 by Ben Vogt : American Life in Poetry #247 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Lau
© Ted Kooser
Family photographs, how much they do capture in all their elbow-to-elbow awkwardness. In this poem, Ben Vogt of Nebraska describes a color snapshot of a Christmas dinner, the family, impatient to tuck in, arrayed along the laden table. I especially like the description of the turkey.
Grandpa Vogt’s-1959
The food is on the table. Turkey tanned
A Dream Of Sappho
© Richard Monckton Milnes
``Stranger! the voice that trembles in your ear,
You would have placed, had you been fancy--free,
First in the chorus of the happiest sphere,
The home of deified mortality:
A Mystery
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
They are dying! they are dying! where the golden corn is growing,
They are dying! they are dying! where the crowded herds are lowing;
They are gasping for existence where the streams of life are flowing,
And they perish of the plague where the breeze of health is blowing!
Song. Hope
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
And said I that all hope was fled,
That sorrow and despair were mine,
That each enthusiast wish was dead,
Had sank beneath pale Miserys shrine.--
If Only
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
If I might only love my God and die!
But now He bids me love Him and live on,
The Whistler
© Virna Sheard
Throughout the sunny day he whistled on his way--
Oh high and low, and gay and sweet,
The Spendthrift
© Edgar Albert Guest
HE died a poor man, so they say,
Few were the dollars stored away
Calais, August 15, 1802
© William Wordsworth
FESTIVALS have I seen that were not names:
This is young Buonaparte's natal day,
The Aeneid of Virgil: Book 4
© Publius Vergilius Maro
BUT anxious cares already seizd the queen:
She fed within her veins a flame unseen;
Love
© Charles Harpur
SHE loves me! From her own bliss-breathing lips
The live confession came, like rich perfume
Ginevra
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
THE DIRGE.
Old winter was gone
In his weakness back to the mountains hoar,
And the spring came down
From the planet that hovers upon the shore
The Island Hawk
© Alfred Noyes
Hushed are the whimpering winds on the hill,
Dumb is the shrinking plain,
Measure For Measure
© Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
By Or Km.
Wake! for the closed Pavilion doors have kept
English Eclogues III - The Funeral
© Robert Southey
The coffin as I past across the lane
Came sudden on my view. It was not here,
When Will It End?
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
O when will it end, this appalling strife,
With its reckless waste of human life,
Its riving of highest, holiest ties,
Its tears of anguish and harrowing sighs,
Its ruined homes from which hope has fled,
Its broken hearts and its countless dead?
Who Would Have Thought?
© George MacDonald
Blow, breath of heaven, on all this poison blow!
And, heart, glow upward to this gracious breath!
Between them, vanish, mist of sin and death,
And let the life of life within me flow!
Love is the green earth, the celestial air,
And music runs like dews and rivers there!
The Beauteous Flower - Son Of The Imprisioned Count
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Were I not prison'd here.
My sorrow sore oppresses me,
For when I was at liberty,
The Looks Of A Lover Enamoured
© George Gascoigne
THOU, with thy looks, on whom I look full oft,
And find therein great cause of deep delight,
The Australiad
© Mary Hannay Foott
Meanwhile the hardy Dutchmen came,as ancient charts attest,
Hartog, and Nuyts, and Carpenter, and Tasman, and the rest,
But found not forests rich in spice, nor market for their wares,
Nor servile tribes to toil oertasked mid pestilential airs,
And deemed it scarce worth while to claim so poor a continent,
But with their slumberous tropic isles thenceforward were content.
