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by
Emily Dickinson
The Sweets of Pillage, can be known
The Sweets of Pillage, can be known
To no one but the Thief --
Compassion for Integrity
Is his divinest Grief --
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by
Robert Burns
474. On seeing Mrs. Kemble in Yarico
KEMBLE, thou cur’st my unbelief
For Moses and his rod;
At Yarico’s sweet nor of grief
The rock with tears had flow’d.
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by
Robert Herrick
FELICITY QUICK OF FLIGHT
Every time seems short to be
That's measured by felicity;
But one half-hour that's made up here
With grief, seems longer than a year.
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by
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
I ask of thee, love, nothing but relief
I ask of thee, love, nothing but relief.
Thou canst not bring the old days back again;
For I was happy then,
Not knowing heavenly joy, not knowing grief.
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by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Borrowing
From the French
SOME of the hurts you have cured
And the sharpest you still have survived
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!
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by
Robert Herrick
UPON HIS SISTER-IN-LAW, MISTRESS ELIZABETHHERRICK
First, for effusions due unto the dead,
My solemn vows have here accomplished;
Next, how I love thee, that my grief must tell,
Wherein thou liv'st for ever.--Dear, farewell!
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by
Stevie Smith
Happiness
Happiness is silent, or speaks equivocally for friends,
Grief is explicit and her song never ends,
Happiness is like England, and will not state a case,
Grief, like Guilt, rushes in and talks apace.
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by
Robert Frost
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
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by
Emily Dickinson
So glad we are -- a Stranger'd deem
'Twas sorry, that we were --
For where the Holiday should be
There publishes a Tear --
Nor how Ourselves be justified --
Since Grief and Joy are done
So similar -- An Optizan
Could not decide between --
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by
Emily Dickinson
If all the griefs I am to have
If all the griefs I am to have
Would only come today,
I am so happy I believe
They'd laugh and run away.
If all the joys I am to have
Would only come today,
They could not be so big as this
That happens to me now.
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by
Emily Dickinson
Softened by Time's consummate plush,
Softened by Time's consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood's citadel
And undermined the years.
Bisected now, by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood's realm,
So easy to repair.
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by
Linda Pastan
Pears
Some say
it was a pear
Eve ate.
Why else the shape
of the womb,
or of the cello
Whose single song is grief
for the parent tree?
Why else the fruit itself
tawny and sweet
which your lover
over breakfast
lets go your pear-
shaped breast
to reach for?
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by
Dylan Thomas
Clown In The Moon
My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.
I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.
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by
Dorothy Parker
The Apple Tree
When first we saw the apple tree
The boughs were dark and straight,
But never grief to give had we,
Though Spring delayed so late.
When last I came away from there
The boughs were heavy hung,
But little grief had I to spare
For Summer, perished young.
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by
Emily Dickinson
Some things that fly there be
Some things that fly there be --
Birds -- Hours -- the Bumblebee --
Of these no Elegy.
Some things that stay there be --
Grief -- Hills -- Eternity --
Nor this behooveth me.
There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!
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by
Robert Herrick
TO HIS KINSWOMAN, MISTRESS SUSANNA HERRICK
When I consider, dearest, thou dost stay
But here awhile, to languish and decay;
Like to these garden glories, which here be
The flowery-sweet resemblances of thee:
With grief of heart, methinks, I thus do cry,
Would thou hadst ne'er been born, or might'st not die!
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by
Sylvia Plath
A Better Resurrection
I have no wit, I have no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
A lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is like the falling leaf;
O Jesus, quicken me.
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by
Thomas Hardy
She At His Funeral
THEY bear him to his resting-place--
In slow procession sweeping by;
I follow at a stranger's space;
His kindred they, his sweetheart I.
Unchanged my gown of garish dye,
Though sable-sad is their attire;
But they stand round with griefless eye,
Whilst my regret consumes like fire!
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by
Denise Levertov
Web
Intricate and untraceable
weaving and interweaving,
dark strand with light:
designed, beyond
all spiderly contrivance,
to link, not to entrap:
elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined;
shaking, changing,
forever
forming,
transforming:
all praise,
all praise to the
great web.
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by
William Henry Davies
the moon
when the body of a woman dissolves
within are the three feared faces
the man who dares to trace them comes
to grief - but nothing personal is meant
waves and particles transvest - vulva
breast and womb are sexless doors
beyond whose suck a sensual light
swings life round its little finger
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by
John Gould Fletcher
Weep no more
WEEP no more, nor sigh, nor groan,
Sorrow calls no time that 's gone:
Violets pluck'd, the sweetest rain
Makes not fresh nor grow again.
Trim thy locks, look cheerfully;
Fate's hid ends eyes cannot see.
Joys as winged dreams fly fast,
Why should sadness longer last?
Grief is but a wound to woe;
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by
James Joyce
Ecce Puer
Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
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by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
O that 'twere possible
O THAT 'twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!...
A shadow flits before me 5
Not thou but like to thee:
Ah Christ! that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved that they might tell us
What and where they be! 10
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by
Thomas Hardy
"How Great My Grief" (Triolet)
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
- Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Nor memory shaped old times anew,
Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee?
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by
Edna St Vincent Millay
The Wood Road
If I were to walk this way
Hand in hand with Grief,
I should mark that maple-spray
Coming into leaf.
I should note how the old burrs
Rot upon the ground.
Yes, though Grief should know me hers
While the world goes round,
It could not if truth be said
This was lost on me:
A rock-maple showing red,
Burrs beneath a tree.
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