Poem of the Day » death http://www.shortpoems.org/poem Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:19:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2 Voices Of The Night : A Psalm Of Life http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/voices-of-the-night-a-psalm-of-life/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/voices-of-the-night-a-psalm-of-life/#comments Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:42:48 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/?p=184 Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, — act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

- Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

“Mr. Longfellow said of this poem: ‘I kept it some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to any one, it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a time when I was rallying from depression.’ Before it was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, October, 1838, it was read by the poet to his college class at the close of a lecture on Goethe. Its title, though used now exclusively for this poem, was originally, in the poet’s mind, a generic one. He notes from time to time that he has written a psalm, a psalm of death, or another psalm of life. The ‘psalmist’ is thus the poet himself. When printed in the Knickerbocker it bore as a motto the lines from Crashaw:

Life that shall send
A challenge to its end,
And when it comes, say, Welcome, friend.”

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The Old Dust http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/the-old-dust/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/the-old-dust/#comments Fri, 09 May 2008 20:29:04 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/05/09/the-old-dust/ The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.

The rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain;
Fu-sang, the tree of immortality,
has crumbled to kindling wood.
Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word

When the green pines feel the coming of the spring.
Looking back, I sigh;
Looking before, I sigh again.
What is there to prize in the life’s vaporous glory?

Translated by:Shigeyoshi Obata

Li Po

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Not Death But Love http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/not-death-but-love/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/not-death-but-love/#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:44:17 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/04/04/not-death-but-love/ I thought once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,

Who each one in a gracious hand appears

To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:

And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,

I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,

The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung

A shadow across me.  Straightway I was ‘ware,

So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,–

“Guess now who holds thee!”–”Death,” I said, But, there,

The silver answer rang, “Not Death, but Love.”

- Elizabeth Browning

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My God is Love and Sweetly Suffers All http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/my-god-is-love-and-sweetly-suffers-all/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/my-god-is-love-and-sweetly-suffers-all/#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:37:24 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/03/28/my-god-is-love-and-sweetly-suffers-all/ I will take from thee the black eternal grip:
Clasping in thy heart thy fate’s exiguous dole
Depart in peace, if peace for man is just.”

But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn,
The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:
“Who is this God imagined by thy night,
Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,
Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?
Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts
And made his sacred floor my human heart.
My God is will and triumphs in his paths,
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.

- Sri Aurobindo

- excerpt from Savitri Book IV Canto II

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I Live yet do not Live in Me – St John of the Cross http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/i-live-yet-do-not-live-in-me-st-john-of-the-cross/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/i-live-yet-do-not-live-in-me-st-john-of-the-cross/#comments Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:20:02 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/03/19/i-live-yet-do-not-live-in-me-st-john-of-the-cross/ I live yet do not live in me,
am waiting as my life goes by,
and die because I do not die.

No longer do I live in me,
and without God I cannot live;
to him or me I cannot give
my self, so what can living be?
A thousand deaths my agony
waiting as my life goes by,
dying because I do not die.

This life I live alone I view
as robbery of life, and so
it is a constant death — with no
way out until I live with you.
God, hear me, what I say is true:
I do not want this life of mine,
and die because I do not die.

Being so removed from you I say
what kind of life can I have here
but death so ugly and severe
and worse than any form of pain?
I pity me — and yet my fate
is that I must keep up this lie,
and die because I do not die.

The fish taken out of the sea
is not without a consolation:
his dying is of brief duration
and ultimately brings relief.
Yet what convulsive death can be
as bad as my pathetic life?
The more I live the more I die.

When I begin to feel relief
on seeing you in the sacrament,
I sink in deeper discontent,
deprived of your sweet company.
Now everything compels my grief:
I want — yet can’t — see you nearby,
and die because I do not die.

Although I find my pleasure, Sir,
in hope of someday seeing you,
I see that I can lose you too,
which makes my pain doubly severe,
and so I live in darkest fear,
and hope, wait as life goes by,
dying because I do not die.

Deliver me from death, my God,
and give me life; now you have wound
a rope about me; harshly bound
I ask you to release the cord.
See how I die to see you, Lord,
and I am shattered where I lie,
dying because I do not die.

My death will trigger tears in me,
and I shall mourn my life: a day
annihilated by the way
I fail and sin relentlessly.
O Father God, when will it be
that I can say without a lie:
I live because I do not die?

- St John of the Cross

Translated by Willis Barnstone

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Song Christina Rossetti http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/song-christina-rossetti/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/song-christina-rossetti/#comments Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:17:27 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/03/18/song-christina-rossetti/ When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

- Christina Rossetti

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O Living Always, Always Dying – W.Whitman http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/o-living-always-always-dying-wwhitman/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/o-living-always-always-dying-wwhitman/#comments Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:23:25 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/02/23/o-living-always-always-dying-wwhitman/ O living always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and
look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.

- Walt Whitman

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It Was Not Death – Emily Dickinson http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/it-was-not-death-emily-dickinson/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/it-was-not-death-emily-dickinson/#comments Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:23:47 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/02/18/it-was-not-death-emily-dickinson/ It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down.
It was not night, for all the bells
Put out their tongues for noon.

It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl,
Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.

And yet it tasted like them all,
The figures I have seen
Set orderly for burial
Reminded me of mine,

As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame
And could not breathe without a key,
And ’twas like midnight, some,

When everything that ticked has stopped
And space stares all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground;

But most like chaos, stopless, cool,
Without a chance, or spar,
Or even a report of land
To justify despair.

- Emily Dickinson

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No Longer Mourn for Me – William Shakespeare http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/no-longer-mourn-for-me-william-shakespeare/ http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/no-longer-mourn-for-me-william-shakespeare/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:36:23 +0000 tejvan http://www.shortpoems.org/poem/2008/02/13/no-longer-mourn-for-me-william-shakespeare/ No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

- William Shakespeare

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