Sad poems
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Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear."
The Mother of Three
© Katharine Tynan
Oh, to have a little farm,
A little hearth so warm and bright,
And three little boys all safe from harm
In from the winter night!
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
© Walt Whitman
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
The Three Brothers Budrys
© Adam Mickiewicz
Doughty Budrys the old, Lithuanian bold,
He has summoned his lusty sons three.
"Your chargers stand idle, now saddle and bridle
And out with your broadswords," quoth he.
Persimmons
© Li-Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
The Lady Of La Garaye - Prologue
© Caroline Norton
This was the Chapel: that the stair:
Here, where all lies damp and bare,
The fragrant thurible was swung,
The silver lamp in beauty hung,
And in that mass of ivied shade
The pale nuns sang--the abbot prayed.
from The Task, Book V: The Winter Morning Walk
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
’Tis morning; and the sun with ruddy orb
Coole Park 1929
© William Butler Yeats
I MEDITATE upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
Baby Villon
© Philip Levine
He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed
Because he’s white; in London because he’s black;
In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab:
Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back.
The Bounty
© Derek Walcott
Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto
The Shepheardes Calender: January
© Edmund Spenser
A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)
when Winters wastful spight was almost spent,
All in a sunneshine day, as did befall,
Led forth his flock, that had been long ypent.
So faynt they woxe, and feeble in the folde,
That now vnnethes their feete could them vphold.
Prince Athanase
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
There was a youth, who, as with toil and travel,
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time;
Nor any could the restless griefs unravel
The Lover And The Moon
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
A LOVER whom duty called over the wave,
With himself communed: "Will my love be true
Baudelaire
© Delmore Schwartz
When I fall asleep, and even during sleep,
I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking
Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,
Having no relation to my affairs.
The Shrubbery
© William Cowper
Oh happy shades—to me unblest!
Friendly to peace, but not to me!
How ill the scene that offers rest,
And heart that cannot rest, agree!
Acon and Rhodope; or, Inconstancy
© Heather Fuller
First of those
Who visited upon this solemn day
The Hamadryad’s oak, were Rhodope
And Acon; of one age, one hope, one trust.
Graceful was she as was the nymph whose fate
She sorrowed for: he slender, pale, and first
I Hate
© C. K. Williams
I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,
not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,
keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise
as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;
The Triumph of Time
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free,
Clenched Soul
© Pablo Neruda
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.
