Famous Death Poems - Page 2

The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red.

The snow recommences;
The buried fences
Mark no longer
The road o'er the plain;

While through the meadows,
Like fearful shadows,
Slowly passes
A funeral train.

The bell is pealing,
And every feeling
Within me responds
To the dismal knell;

Shadows are trailing,
My heart is bewailing
And tolling within
Like a funeral bell.

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
   A gentle face — the face of one long dead —
   Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
   The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
   Never through martyrdom of fire was led
   To its repose; nor can in books be read
   The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
   That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
   Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
   These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
   And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

Father and I were gypsies.―
    We tried to lose our way
Among the woodland mystery,
    When we'd a holiday.

My hand about his finger,
    We followed brook and dell.
No need to voice our ecstasy―
    The robins told it well.

His love I took for granted,
    Owned every dear caress,
Nor dreame'd of how a little girl
    Would feel when fatherless.

Now I, poor lonely gypsey,
    Roam wood and hill and blue;
But no one loves them all with me
    As Father used to do.

My joy leaps with your ecstasy,
    In sympathy divine;
The smiles that wreathe upon your lips,
    Find sentinels on mine:

Your lightest sigh I'm echoing,
    I tremble with your pain,
And all your tears are falling
    In my heart like bitter rain.

Break, break, break,
    On thy cold gray stones, O sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
    The thoughts that arise in me.

Oh, well for the fisherman's boy,
    That he shouts with his sister at play!
Oh, well for the sailor lad,
    That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
    To their haven under the hill;
But oh for the touch of a vanished hand,
    And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
    At the foot of thy crags, O sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
    Will never come back to me.