Sad poems
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Paradise Lost : Book X.
© John Milton
Mean while the heinous and despiteful act
Of Satan, done in Paradise; and how
The Troubadour. Canto 4
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
But he was safe!--that very day
Farewell, it had been her's to say;
And he was gone to his own land,
To seek another maiden's hand.
When You Are Old
© William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
Madrono
© Francis Bret Harte
Captain of the Western wood,
Thou that apest Robin Hood !
Green above thy scarlet hose,
How thy velvet mantle shows !
Never tree like thee arrayed,
O thou gallant of the glade!
The Home of Taliessin
© Alaric Alexander Watts
I stood on the spot where the famed Taliessin,
âThe Prince of the Bards,â had his dwelling of old;
Stanzas To the Memory Of George III
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
'Among many nations was there no King like him.' Nehemiah, xiii, 26.
'Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?' 2 Samuel, iii, 38.
Improvisations: Light And Snow: 10
© Conrad Aiken
It is night time, and cold, and snow is falling,
And no wind grieves the walls.
"The falling is the constant mate of fear"
© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
The falling is the constant mate of fear,
And feel of emptiness is the feel of fright.
Who throws us the stones from the height --
And stones here refuse the dust to bear?
Happiness
© Wilfred Owen
Yet heaven looks smaller than the old doll's-home,
No nestling place is left in bluebell bloom,
And the wide arms of trees have lost their scope.
The former happiness is unreturning:
Boys' griefs are not so grievous as our yearning,
Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.
English Eclogues VI - The Ruined Cottage
© Robert Southey
I pass this ruin'd dwelling oftentimes
And think of other days. It wakes in me
A transient sadness, but the feelings Charles
That ever with these recollections rise,
I trust in God they will not pass away.
Epilogue to Schiller's Song of the Bell
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mingled the crowds from ev'ry region brought,
And on the stage, in festal pomp array'd
The HOMAGE OF THE ARTS we saw displayed.
Christmas Night Of '62
© William Gordon McCabe
The wintry blast goes wailing by,
The snow is falling overhead;
I hear the lonely sentry's tread,
And distant watch-fires light the sky.
The Cowboy
© James Tate
Someone had spread an elaborate rumor about me, that I was
in possession of an extraterrestrial being, and I thought I knew who
The Pains of Sleep
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
Elegy XXIV. He Takes Occasion, From the Fate of Eleanor of Bretagne
© William Shenstone
When Beauty mourns, by Fate's injurious doom,
Hid from the cheerful glance of human eye,
When Nature's pride inglorious waits the tomb,
Hard is that heart which checks the rising sigh.
For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen
© Hart Crane
There is the world dimensional for
those untwisted by the love of things
irreconcilable ...
1994
© Paul Celan
i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when a thumb of ice
stamped itself hard near my heart
From Laughter To Labor
© Edgar Albert Guest
We have wandered afar in our hunting for pleasure,
We have scorned the soul's duty to gather up treasure;
We have lived for our laughter and toiled for our winning
And paid little heed to the soul's simple sinning.
But light were the burdens that freighted us then,
God and country, to-day let us prove we are men!
