I'm a little tardy with the C poems, but I'm making up some ground now!! Here's 3 of them with some theme similarity (but only some) ... I particularly like the last one. Just seems to speak clearly of a child's world and a child's imagination.
The Child Dying
Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse,
And bid you so farewell.
That I can leave you, quite go out,
Go out, go out beyond all doubt,
My father says, is the miracle.
You are so great, and I so small:
I am nothing, you are all:
Being nothing, I can take this way.
Oh I need neither rise nor fall,
For when I do not move at all
I shall be out of all your day.
It's said some memory will remain
In the other place, grass in the rain,
Light on the land, sun on the sea,
A flitting grace, a phantom face,
But the world is out. There is not place
Where it and its ghost can ever be.
Father, father, I dread this air
Blown from the far side of despair
The cold cold corner. What house, what hold,
What hand is there? I look and see
Nothing-filled eternity,
And the great round world grows weak and old.
Hold my hand, oh hold it fast-
I am changing! - until at last
My hand in yours no more will change,
Though yours change on. You here, I there,
So hand in hand, twin-leafed despair -
I did not know death was so strange.
Edwin Muir
Code: Select all
A Child’s Pet
When I sailed out of Baltimore,
With twice a thousand head of sheep,
They would not eat, they would not drink,
But bleated o'er the deep
Inside the pens we crawled each day
To sort the living from the dead;
And when we reached the Mersey's mouth
Had lost five hundred head.
Yet every night and day one sheep,
That had no fear of man or sea
Stuck through the bars its pleading face,
And it was stroked by me.
And to the sheep-men standing near,
'You see,' I said, 'this one tame sheep?
It seems a child has lost her pet,
And cried herself to sleep.'
So every time we passed it by
Sailing to England's slaughterhouse,
Eight ragged sheep-men -- tramps and thieves --
Would stroke that sheep's black nose.
W. H. Davies
Child’s Song
My cheap toy lamp
Gives little light
All night, all night,
When my muscles cramp.
Sometimes I touch your hand
Across my cot,
And our fingers knot,
But there’s no hand
to take me home –
No Carribean
Island, where even
The shark is at home.
It must be heaven.
There on that island
The white sand shines
Like a birchwood fire.
Help, saw me in two,
Put me on the shelf!
Sometimes the little muddler
can’t stand itself!
Robert Lowell
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