Best Elegy Poems

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
...

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
...

As the Sun withdrew his rays from the garden, and the moon threw cushioned beams upon the flowers, I sat under the trees pondering upon the phenomena of the atmosphere, looking through the branches at the strewn stars which glittered like chips of silver upon a blue carpet; and I could hear from a distance the agitated murmur of the rivulet singing its way briskly into the valley.
...

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride
...

(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
...

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
...

From my cradle up to he breathes last
Being a shadow against the sun,
A brightening star from the dusk,
The real glorious at dawn
...

Spring


Come, my beloved; let us walk amidst the knolls,
...

Your eyes are a thorn in my heart
Inflicting pain, yet I cherish that thorn
And shield it from the wind.
I sheathe it in my flesh, I sheathe it, protecting it from night and agony,
...

Hush, thrush! Hush, missen-thrush, I listen...
I heard the flush of footsteps through the loose leaves,
And a low whistle by the water's brim.
...

That some day, emerging at last from the terrifying vision
I may burst into jubilant praise to assenting angels!
That of the clear-struck keys of the heart not one may fail
to sound because of a loose, doubtful or broken string!
...

Words,
mere words,
Mind’s birds.
Alpha to omega,
...

What beck'ning ghost, along the moon-light shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
'Tis she!--but why that bleeding bosom gor'd,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?
...

Not one corner of a foreign field
But a span as wide as Europe;
An appearance of a titan's grave,
And the length thereof a thousand miles,
...

Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though he never fight.
...

O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are not of one mind. Are not like birds
in unison migrating. And overtaken,
overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind
...

A poet is born
A poet dies
And all that lies between
is us
...

"His Grace! impossible! what, dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that mighty warrior fall,
And so inglorious, after all?
...

By our first strange and fatal interview,
By all desires which thereof did ensue,
By our long starving hopes, by that remorse
Which my words' masculine persuasive force
...

In the thin classroom, where your face
was noble and your words were all things,
I find this boily creature in your place;
...

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
...

Who ever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
Love is a bear-whelp born: if we o'erlick
...

born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
...

Like rainbows dissolving or love's end
We mourn the parting of friends

As the Sun travels East to West
...

That some day, emerging at last from the terrifying vision
I may burst into jubilant praise to assenting angels!
That of the clear-struck keys of the heart not one may fail
to sound because of a loose, doubtful or broken string!
...

Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.
...

Fond woman, which wouldst have thy husband die,
And yet complain'st of his great jealousy;
If swol'n with poison, he lay in his last bed,
His body with a sere-bark covered,
...

Image of her whom I love, more than she,
Whose fair impression in my faithful heart
Makes me her medal, and makes her love me,
As Kings do coins, to which their stamps impart
...

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
...

~ SIZE ZERO ~ GROUND ZERO ~
Ms. Nivedita
UK.
30.11.09.
...

I have enough treasures from the past
to last me longer than I need, or want.
You know as well as I . . . malevolent memory
won't let go of half of them:
...

Here take my picture; though I bid farewell
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more
When we are shadows both, than 'twas before
...

SINCE she must go, and I must mourn, come night,
Environ me with darkness, whilst I write ;
Shadow that hell unto me, which alone
...

Once, and but once found in thy company,
All thy supposed escapes are laid on me;
And as a thief at bar is questioned there
By all the men that have been robed that year,
...

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape,
This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.
...

Marry, and love thy Flavia, for she
Hath all things whereby others beautious be,
For, though her eyes be small, her mouth is great,
Though they be ivory, yet her teeth be jet,
...

Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love,
And in that sophistry, Oh, thou dost prove
Too subtle: Foole, thou didst not understand
The mystic language of the eye nor hand:
...

Sometimes at night I hear small birds lament.
Dark notes that seem to second moon's descent.
Cold is the color of a deep regret,
An etude perfected by winterset.
...

Ah, but the City of Pain: how strange its streets are:
the false silence of sound drowning sound,
and there--proud, brazen, effluence from the mold of emptiness--
the gilded hubbub, the bursting monument.
...

O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are not of one mind. Are not like birds
in unison migrating. And overtaken,
overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind
...

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,
As that which from chafed musk-cats' pores doth trill,
As the almighty balm of th' early East,
Such are the sweat drops of my mistress' breast,
...

Although thy hand and faith, and good works too,
Have seal'd thy love which nothing should undo,
Yea though thou fall back, that apostasy
Confirm thy love; yet much, much I fear thee.
...

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour
the bottle in your coat half voda half winter light.
To what and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?
...

Her dead lady's joy and comfort,
Who departed this life
The last day of March, 1727:
To the great joy of Bryan
...

In summer's heat and mid-time of the day
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay,
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light, as twinkles in a wood,
...

1 Shock's fate I mourn; poor Shock is now no more,
2 Ye Muses mourn, ye chamber-maids deplore.
3 Unhappy Shock! yet more unhappy fair,
4 Doom'd to survive thy joy and only care!
...

Your dextrous wit will haunt us long
Wounding our grief with yesterday.
Your laughter is a broken song;
And death has found you, kind and gay.
...

Oh, let me not serve so, as those men serve
Whom honour's smokes at once fatten and starve;
Poorly enrich't with great men's words or looks;
Nor so write my name in thy loving books
...

Cold sunshine writes our elegy in frost,
Author of light a million snowflakes lost,
All gone forever into swirling air,
A dance of death that is no longer there.
...

I know but will not tell
you, Aunt Irene, why there
are soap suds in the whiskey:
Uncle Robert had to have
...

TO make the doubt clear, that no woman's true,
Was it my fate to prove it strong in you?
Thought I, but one had breathèd purest air ;
And must she needs be false, because she's fair?
...

Inscribed to Robert Aiken, Esq.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
...

About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings
from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
...

There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;
...

Let them bury your big eyes
In the secret earth securely,
Your thin fingers, and your fair,
Soft, indefinite-colored hair,—
...

An Elegy for Tristan Tzara

In the hungry kitchen
The dog sings for its dinner.
...

I.
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
And what remains to us of thee?
...

I

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:
His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,
...

The cur foretells the knell of parting day;
The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
...

Echoes from the outside
The shades of evening soul
Step by step dance toward the open windows
Bring out the sounds when the wind blows
...

Now, Chatto, you're a dreary place,
Pale sorrow broods on ilka face;
Therburn has run his race.
...

1.

O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
...

You were my constant companion
You were my faultless friend
You were my unfailing guide
You were my timely whip!
...

By our first strange and fatal interview,
By all desires which thereof did ensue,
By our long starving hopes, by that remorse
...

Inscribed to Robert Aiken, Esq.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
...

You left in the morning, at evening my heart is in a
thousand pieces.
Why is it so far away?
...

Too much my heart of Beauty's power hath known,
Too long to Love hath reason left her throne;
Too long my genius mourn'd his myrtle chain,
...

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
...

I am a girl
with all feminine worries
complaints and objection to all
just for nothing
...

Too heedless friend, why thus augment the flame
That glows resistless in my beating breast?
Why with thy praises grace his fatal name,
Who robs thy Emma's hapless heart of rest?
...

BURYING friends is not a pomp,
Not, indeed, Roman:
Lacking the monument,
Heroic stone;
...

(For G. H.)

Say, does that stupid earth
Where they have laid her,
...

This English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea
Breaking across the woodland, with the foam
Of meadow-sweet and white anemone
...

THE smell of birds' nests faintly burning
Is autumn. In the autumn I came
Where spring had used me better,
...

She woke up gleefully at dawn,
With barely a half night's sleep done,
As her husband skyped her last night,
To tell her he would come home tonight.
...

Till I have peace with thee, warr other Men,
And when I have peace, can I leave thee then?
All other Warrs are scrupulous; Only thou
...

I think the dusk has slipped beyond all words.
You speak spring with an accent never heard.
A poem on an Appalachian pane
Is bringing April back via the rain.
...

1
How inseparable you and the America you saw yet was never
...

Mournful groans, as when a tempest lowers,
Echo from the dreary house of woe;
Death-notes rise from yonder minster's towers!
Bearing out a youth, they slowly go;
...

Hark, news, O envy ; thou shalt hear descried
My Julia ; who as yet was ne'er envied.
To vomit gall in slander, swell her veins
...

Jane is big
with death, Don
sad and kind - Jane
though she's dying
...

MADAM—
That I might make your cabinet my tomb,
And for my fame, which I love next my soul,
Next to my soul provide the happiest room,
...

Thou burden of all songs the earth hath sung,
Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes,
Thou metaphor of everything that dies,
...

'I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew!
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers'~Shakespeare
...

Then thou hast learnt the secret of my soul,
Officious Friendship has its trust betrayed;
No more I need the bursting sigh control,
Nor summon pride my struggling soul to aid.
...

Since I lost you, my darling, the sky has come near,
And I am of it, the small sharp stars are quite near,
The white moon going among them like a white bird among snow-berries,
And the sound of her gently rustling in heaven like a bird I hear.
...

AN ELEGY.
Addressed to a Lady, who was affected at seeing the
Funeral of a nameless Pauper, buried at the ex-
...

IT was a beautiful and silent day
That overspread the countenance of earth,
Then fading with unusual quietness,--
...

Well; 'tis as Bickerstaff has guess'd,
Though we all took it for a jest:
Partridge is dead; nay more, he died
...

Horace: Book II, Elegy 8

"Eripitur nobis iam pridem cara puella---"
...

NEAR yon bleak mountain's dizzy height,
That hangs o'er AVON's silent wave;
By the pale Crescent's glimm'ring light,
I sought LORENZO's lonely grave.
...

Elegy In Haiku
February 5, 2020
...

NOT that in colour it was like thy hair,
For armlets of that thou mayst let me wear;
Nor that thy hand it oft embraced and kiss'd,
...

'DARK gathering clouds involve the threatening skies,
The sea heaves conscious of the impending gloom,
Deep, hollow murmurs from the cliffs arise;
...

COME Fates ; I fear you not ! All whom I owe
Are paid, but you ; then 'rest me ere I go.
But Chance from you all sovereignty hath got ;
...

Fair was thy blossom, tender flower,
That open'd like the rose in May,
Though nursed beneath the chilly shower
Of fell regret, for love's decay.
...

"With female Fairies will thy tomb be haunted
"And worms will not come to thee." SHAKSPERE.
...

Candidia has taken a new lover
And three poets are gone into mourning.
The first has written a long elegy to 'Chloris',
...

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,
Wi' saut tears tricklin down your nose;
Our bardie's fate is at a close,
Past a' remead!
...

Near the lone pile with ivy overspread,
Fast by the rivulet's sleep-persuading sound,
Where 'sleeps the moonlight' on yon verdant bed--
...