Best Despair Poems

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
...

Be glad your nose is on your face,
not pasted on some other place,
for if it were where it is not,
you might dislike your nose a lot.
...

...

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
...

Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no
No question was asked me--it could not be so !
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try
And to live on be YES; what can NO be ? to die.
...

Self lost in obsessive agony,  
Your primal passion - a flaming ferocity,  
The raging fire consumes your dignity,  
And shame is put to slumber.
...

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
...

O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive
To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare
Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach.
I cease to wonder, and no more attempt
...

Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
...

Who is he?
A railroad track toward hell?
Breaking like a stick of furniture?
The hope that suddenly overflows the cesspool?
...

He said he loved me! Then he called my hair
Silk threads wherewith sly Cupid strings his bow,
My cheek a rose leaf fallen on new snow;
And swore my round, full throat would bring despair
...

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man
In me {'o}r, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
...

Art thou abroad on this stormy night
on thy journey of love, my friend?
The sky groans like one in despair.
...

I TELL you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
...

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
...

I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
...

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
...

.
the ghosts are walking again
walking and talking in the night again
sorrow is eating my bones again
...

Art thou abroad on this stormy night
on thy journey of love, my friend?
The sky groans like one in despair.
...

'Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
...

I love my love
As love should love
But you never love
As my love should love me.
...

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
...

Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
...

No one's despair is like my despair--

You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
...

Of all who hail thy presence as the morning-
Of all to whom thine absence is the night-
The blotting utterly from out high heaven
The sacred sun- of all who, weeping, bless thee
...

Bitterly, England must thou grieve
Though none of these poor men who died
But did within his soul believe
That death for thee was glorified.
...

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
...

I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching
...

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
...

They clamour and fight, they doubt and despair, they know no end
to their wrangling.
Let your life come amongst them like a flame of light, my
child, unflickering and pure, and delight them into silence.
...

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
...

Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.
...

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
...

The hounds of despair, the hounds of the autumnal wind,
Gnaw with their howling the black echoes of evenings.
The darkness, immensely, gropes in the emptiness
For the moon, seen by the light of water.
...

The dawn is smiling on the dew that covers
The tearful roses; lo, the little lovers
That kiss the buds, and all the flutterings
In jasmine bloom, and privet, of white wings,
...

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--
...

She who ever had remained in the depth of my being,
in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses;
she who never opened her veils in the morning light,
will be my last gift to thee, my God, folded in my final song.
...

O FLY thee from the shades of night,
Where the loud tempests yelling rise;
Where horrror wings her sullen flight
Beneath the bleak and lurid skies.
...

Yesterday I drew myself from the noisome throngs and proceeded into the field until I reached a knoll upon which Nature had spread her comely garments. Now I could breathe.

I looked back, and the city appeared with its magnificent mosques and stately residences veiled by the smoke of the shops.
...

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
...

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
...

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.
...

Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain,
Lest sorrow lend me words and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
...

Alone.........I sit
By the fishing hole
Didn't bring..don't need
...No fishing pole
...

I awake,
Dreams burdened with your eyes.

A recollection of temperance
...

Music, like an ocean, often carries me away!
Through the ether far,
or under a canopy of mist, I set sail
...

I.
Dares the lama, most fleet of the sons of the wind,
The lion to rouse from his skull-covered lair?
...

In grayish doubt and black despair,
I drafted hymns to the earth and the air,
pretending to joy, although I lacked it.
The age had made lament redundant.
...

Do not despair of man, and do not scold him,
Who are you that you should so lightly hold him?
Are you not also a man, and in your heart
...

393

Did Our Best Moment last—
'Twould supersede the Heaven—
...

As due by many titles I resign
My self to Thee, O God; first I was made
By Thee, and for Thee, and when I was decayed
Thy blood bought that, the which before was Thine;
...

Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no
No question was asked me--it could not be so !
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try
And to live on be YES; what can NO be ? to die.
...

The days are shorter and nights still longer
Before they are gone, prove yourself stronger
Otherwise you will be aloof, lonely and stranger
considered as untrustworthy and in danger
...

Loneliness, anxiety, and despair,
isolation, sorrow, bitterness -
these the cruel concerns, observers note,
that press upon our current consciousness.
...

Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse,
And bid you so farewell.
That I can leave you, quite go out,
...

799

Despair's advantage is achieved
By suffering—Despair—
...

Weary not of us, for we are very beautiful; it is out of very jealousy and proper pride that we entered the veil.
On the day when we cast of the body’s veil from the soul, you will see that we are the envy of despair of man and the Polestars.
Wash your face and become clean for beholding us, else remain afar, for we are beloveds of ourselves.
We are not that beauty who tomorrow will become a crone; till eternity we are young and heart-comforting and fair of stature.
...

There should be no despair for you
While nightly stars are burning,
While evening pours its silent dew
And sunshine gilds the morning.
...

(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)


THE LEADEN ECHO
...

Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low;
...

Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
...

The night rain sing the song
To benumb my soul all along.
Grief breaks heart's fence
Over the hills of silence
...

I keep such music in my brain
No din this side of death can quell;
Glory exulting over pain,
And beauty, garlanded in hell.
...

ONE word is too often profaned
   For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdain'd
   For thee to disdain it;
...

Utopia is a place where you can find pure air
A place where everyone is kind, polite and fair
A place where there are Angels flying everywhere
A place where there is neither sadness nor despair.
...

Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;
Lest sorrow lend me words and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
...

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
...

.
Yesterday
and for so many yesterdays
day after day of yesterdays
...

Large shadows loomed
On my heart
I was unable
To dispel the gloom
...

Without the moon or stars to guide his sight,
without a glint from shanties down below,
he rested on the foggy hill that night,
and begged the heavens for a tiny glow.
...

Queen of every moving measure,
Sweetest source of purest pleasure,
Music; why thy powers employ
Only for the sons of joy?
...

To Despair

I ever love where never hope appears,
Yet hope draws on my never-hoping care,
...

The forward violet thus did I chide:
"Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft check for complexion dwells
...

She
Fell asleep
Without lullaby and tale
Rested in peace
...

"Adam, where are you?"
          God's hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
...

The days are shorter and nights still longer
Before they are gone, prove yourself stronger
Otherwise you will be aloof, lonely and stranger
considered as untrustworthy and in danger
...

999

Superfluous were the Sun
When Excellence be dead
...

For want of bread to eat and clothes to wear —
Because work failed and streets were deep in snow,
...

There was a Young Lady in White,
Who looked out at the depths of the Night;
But the birds of the air
...

The meadow and the mountain with desire
Gazed on each other, till a fierce unrest
Surged ‘neath the meadow’s seemingly calm breast,
And all the mountain’s fissures ran with fire.
...

Strange violin, why do you follow me?
In how many foreign cities did you
speak of your lonely nights and those of mine.
Are you being played by hundreds? Or by one?
...

This is for my people who just lost somebody,
their best friend, their baby, man or their lady,
put your heads real high,
we will never say bye.
...

If this be love, to draw a weary breath,
Paint on floods, till the shore, cry to th'air,
With downward looks still reading on the earth,
The sad memorials of my love's despair.
...

. These times strike monied worldlings with dismay:
Even rich men, brave by nature, taint the air
With words of apprehension and despair:
While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,
...

Verse-making was least of my virtues: I viewed with despair
Wealth that never yet was but might be--all that verse-making were
If the life would but lengthen to wish, let the mind be laid bare.
So I said, "To do little is bad, to do nothing is worse"--
...

Bid me to live, and I will live
Thy Protestant to be;
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee.
...

Hoar Time about the house betakes him slow,
Seeking an entry for his weariness.
And in that dreadful company distress
...

No one dares dream of beach houses
While walking on these dirty city streets
In the misty sullen rain
Where the children smile despite some new despair
...

TURN in, my lord, she said ;
As it were the Father of Sin
I have hated the Father of the Dead,
The slayer of my kin ;
...

I heard a padshah giving orders to kill a prisoner. The helpless
fellow began to insult the king on that occasion of despair, with
the tongue he had, and to use foul expressions according to the
saying:
...

Whoever you are as you read this,
Whatever your trouble or grief,
I want you to know and to heed this:
The day draweth near with relief.
...

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
...

Like a painter I run a brush
Over the canvas to blossom
The flowers of emptiness
In the garden of namelessness
...

Love thyself last. Look near, behold thy duty
To those who walk beside thee down life’s road;
Make glad their days by little acts of beauty,
And help them bear the burden of earth’s load.
...

A slant of sun on dull brown walls,
A forgotten sky of bashful blue.

Toward God a mighty hymn,
...

Fragrance of flowers, Soul mates in pair
Running with romance, Taking loves dare
Making the moments, Without despair
Smiles of sunshine, Blossoming air
...

A night drive to Ein Yahav in the Arava Desert,
a drive in the rain. Yes, in the rain.
There I met people who grow date palms,
there I saw tamarisk trees and risk trees,
...

Go, wailing verse, the infants of my love,
Minerva-like, brought forth without a Mother:
Present the image of the cares I prove;
Witness your Father's grief exceeds all other.
...

And still they come and go: and this is all I know—
That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show,
Where wild or listless faces flicker on their way,
With glad or grievous hearts I’ll never understand
...

Said God, 'You sisters, ere ye go
Down among men, my work to do,
I will on each a badge bestow:
Hope I love best, and gold for her,
...