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Best Famous Twenty Four Poems

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Written by Allen Ginsberg | Create an image from this poem

Plutonian Ode

 I

What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there
 a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative,
 Scientific theme
First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poison-
 ous hand, named for Death's planet through the 
 sea beyond Uranus
whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of 
 Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-
 King worshipped once
with black sheep throats cut, priests's face averted from
 underground mysteries in single temple at Eleusis,
Spring-green Persephone nuptialed to his inevitable
 Shade, Demeter mother of asphodel weeping dew,
her daughter stored in salty caverns under white snow, 
 black hail, grey winter rain or Polar ice, immemor-
 able seasons before
Fish flew in Heaven, before a Ram died by the starry
 bush, before the Bull stamped sky and earth
or Twins inscribed their memories in clay or Crab'd
 flood
washed memory from the skull, or Lion sniffed the
 lilac breeze in Eden--
Before the Great Year began turning its twelve signs,
 ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand
 sunny years
slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred 
 sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night

Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning 
 black dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disil-
 lusion?
I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years
I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your
 dreadful presence last majestic as the Gods,
Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, 
 Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an
 Abyss of Light,
Sophia's reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirl-
 pools of starspume silver-thin as hairs of Einstein!
Father Whitman I celebrate a matter that renders Self
 oblivion!
Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages'
 prayers, old orators' inspired Immortalities,
I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious
 sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River,
 Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque
I yell thru Washington, South Carolina, Colorado, 
 Texas, Iowa, New Mexico,
Where nuclear reactors creat a new Thing under the 
 Sun, where Rockwell war-plants fabricate this death
 stuff trigger in nitrogen baths,
Hanger-Silas Mason assembles the terrified weapon
 secret by ten thousands, & where Manzano Moun-
 tain boasts to store
its dreadful decay through two hundred forty millenia
 while our Galaxy spirals around its nebulous core.
I enter your secret places with my mind, I speak with 
 your presence, I roar your Lion Roar with mortal
 mouth.
One microgram inspired to one lung, ten pounds of 
 heavy metal dust adrift slow motion over grey
 Alps
the breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance
 speeds blight and death to sentient beings?
Enter my body or not I carol my spirit inside you,
 Unnaproachable Weight,
O heavy heavy Element awakened I vocalize your con-
 sciousness to six worlds
I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah monster of Anger
 birthed in fear O most
Ignorant matter ever created unnatural to Earth! Delusion
 of metal empires!
Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous
 Generals, Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!
Judgement of judgements, Divine Wind over vengeful 
 nations, Molester of Presidents, Death-Scandal of
 Capital politics! Ah civilizations stupidly indus-
 trious!
Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate! Manu-
 factured Spectre of human reason! O solidified
 imago of practicioner in Black Arts
I dare your reality, I challenge your very being! I 
 publish your cause and effect!
I turn the wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons!
 Your name enters mankind's ear! I embody your
 ultimate powers!
My oratory advances on your vaunted Mystery! This 
 breath dispels your braggart fears! I sing your 
 form at last
behind your concrete & iron walls inside your fortress
 of rubber & translucent silicon shields in filtered
 cabinets and baths of lathe oil,
My voice resounds through robot glove boxes & ignot 
 cans and echoes in electric vaults inert of atmo-
 sphere,
I enter with spirit out loud into your fuel rod drums
 underground on soundless thrones and beds of
 lead
O density! This weightless anthem trumpets transcendent 
 through hidden chambers and breaks through 
 iron doors into the Infernal Room!
Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony 
 floats audible, these jubilant tones are honey and 
 milk and wine-sweet water
Poured on the stone black floor, these syllables are
 barley groats I scatter on the Reactor's core, 
I call your name with hollow vowels, I psalm your Fate
 close by, my breath near deathless ever at your
 side
to Spell your destiny, I set this verse prophetic on your
 mausoleum walls to seal you up Eternally with
 Diamond Truth! O doomed Plutonium.

 II

The Bar surveys Plutonian history from midnight 
 lit with Mercury Vapor streetlamps till in dawn's 
 early light
he contemplates a tranquil politic spaced out between 
 Nations' thought-forms proliferating bureaucratic
& horrific arm'd, Satanic industries projected sudden
 with Five Hundred Billion Dollar Strength
around the world same time this text is set in Boulder,
 Colorado before front range of Rocky Mountains
twelve miles north of Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility in 
 United States of North America, Western Hemi-
 sphere
of planet Earth six months and fourteen days around
 our Solar System in a Spiral Galaxy
the local year after Dominion of the last God nineteen 
 hundred seventy eight
Completed as yellow hazed dawn clouds brighten East,
 Denver city white below
Blue sky transparent rising empty deep & spacious to a 
 morning star high over the balcony 
above some autos sat with wheels to curb downhill 
 from Flatiron's jagged pine ridge,
sunlit mountain meadows sloped to rust-red sandstone
 cliffs above brick townhouse roofs
as sparrows waked whistling through Marine Street's
 summer green leafed trees.

 III

This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you
 father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress
 and American people,
you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers,
 you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and 
 consonants to breath's end
take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breath
 out this blessing from your breast on our creation 
forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains 
 in the Ten Directions pacify with exhalation,
enrich this Plutonian Ode to explode its empty thunder
 through earthen thought-worlds
Magnetize this howl with heartless compassion, destroy
 this mountain of Plutonium with ordinary mind
 and body speech,
thus empower this Mind-guard spirit gone out, gone
 out, gone beyond, gone beyond me, Wake space,
 so Ah!

 July 14, 1978


Written by David Lehman | Create an image from this poem

Shake The Superflux!

 I like walking on streets as black and wet as this one
now, at two in the solemnly musical morning, when everyone else
in this town emptied of Lestrygonians and Lotus-eaters
is asleep or trying or worrying why
they aren't asleep, while unknown to them Ulysses walks
into the shabby apartment I live in, humming and feeling
happy with the avant-garde weather we're having,
the winds (a fugue for flute and oboe) pouring
into the windows which I left open although
I live on the ground floor and there have been
two burglaries on my block already this week,
do I quickly take a look to see
if the valuables are missing? No, that is I can't,
it's an epistemological quandary: what I consider
valuable, would they? Who are they, anyway? I'd answer that
with speculations based on newspaper accounts if I were
Donald E. Westlake, whose novels I'm hooked on, but
this first cigarette after twenty-four hours
of abstinence tastes so good it makes me want
to include it in my catalogue of pleasures
designed to hide the ugliness or sweep it away
the way the violent overflow of rain over cliffs
cleans the sewers and drains of Ithaca
whose waterfalls head my list, followed by
crudites of carrots and beets, roots and all,
with rained-on radishes, too beautiful to eat,
and the pure pleasure of talking, talking and not knowing
where the talk will lead, but willing to take my chances.
Furthermore I shall enumerate some varieties of tulips
(Bacchus, Tantalus, Dardanelles) and other flowers
with names that have a life of their own (Love Lies Bleeding,
Dwarf Blue Bedding, Burning Bush, Torch Lily, Narcissus).
Mostly, as I've implied, it's the names of things
that count; still, sometimes I wonder and, wondering, find
the path of least resistance, the earth's orbit
around the sun's delirious clarity. Once you sniff
the aphrodisiac of disaster, you know: there's no reason
for the anxiety--or for expecting to be free of it;
try telling Franz Kafka he has no reason to feel guilty;
or so I say to well-meaning mongers of common sense.
They way I figure, you start with the names
which are keys and then you throw them away
and learn to love the locked rooms, with or without
corpses inside, riddles to unravel, emptiness to possess,
a woman to wake up with a kiss (who is she?
no one knows) who begs your forgiveness (for what?
you cannot know) and then, in the authoritative tone
of one who has weathered the storm of his exile, orders you
to put up your hands and beg the rain to continue
as if it were in your power. And it is,
I feel it with each drop. I am standing
outside at the window, looking in on myself
writing these words, feeling what wretches feel, just
as the doctor ordered. And that's what I plan to do,
what the storm I was caught in reminded me to do,
to shake the superflux, distribute my appetite, fast
without so much as a glass of water, and love
each bite I haven't taken. I shall become the romantic poet
whose coat of many colors smeared
with blood, like a butcher's apron, left
in the sacred pit or brought back to my father
to confirm my death, confirms my new life
instead, an alien prince of dungeons and dreams
who sheds the disguise people recognize him by
to reveal himself to his true brothers at last
in the silence that stuns before joy descends, like rain.
Written by Primo Levi | Create an image from this poem

The Survivor

 I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.

The following are empty synonyms:
man and beast
love and hate
friend and foe
darkness and light.

The way of killing men and beasts is the same
I've seen it:
truckfuls of chopped-up men
who will not be saved.

Ideas are mere words:
virtue and crime
truth and lies
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.

Virtue and crime weigh the same
I've seen it:
in a man who was both
criminal and virtuous.

I seek a teacher and a master
may he restore my sight hearing and speech
may he again name objects and ideas
may he separate darkness from light.

I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.
Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Carol of Words

 1
EARTH, round, rolling, compact—suns, moons, animals—all these are words to be
 said; 
Watery, vegetable, sauroid advances—beings, premonitions, lispings of the future, 
Behold! these are vast words to be said. 

Were you thinking that those were the words—those upright lines? those curves,
 angles,
 dots? 
No, those are not the words—the substantial words are in the ground and sea,
They are in the air—they are in you. 

Were you thinking that those were the words—those delicious sounds out of your
 friends’
 mouths? 
No, the real words are more delicious than they. 

Human bodies are words, myriads of words; 
In the best poems re-appears the body, man’s or woman’s, well-shaped, natural,
 gay,
Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame. 

2
Air, soil, water, fire—these are words; 
I myself am a word with them—my qualities interpenetrate with theirs—my name is
 nothing to
 them; 
Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would air, soil, water, fire,
 know of
 my
 name? 

A healthy presence, a friendly or commanding gesture, are words, sayings, meanings;
The charms that go with the mere looks of some men and women, are sayings and meanings
 also. 

3
The workmanship of souls is by the inaudible words of the earth; 
The great masters know the earth’s words, and use them more than the audible words. 

Amelioration is one of the earth’s words; 
The earth neither lags nor hastens;
It has all attributes, growths, effects, latent in itself from the jump; 
It is not half beautiful only—defects and excrescences show just as much as
 perfections
 show. 

The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough; 
The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d either; 
They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print;
They are imbued through all things, conveying themselves willingly, 
Conveying a sentiment and invitation of the earth—I utter and utter, 
I speak not, yet if you hear me not, of what avail am I to you? 
To bear—to better—lacking these, of what avail am I? 

4
Accouche! Accouchez!
Will you rot your own fruit in yourself there? 
Will you squat and stifle there? 

The earth does not argue, 
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, 
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, 
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out, 
Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out. 

5
The earth does not exhibit itself, nor refuse to exhibit itself—possesses still
 underneath; 
Underneath the ostensible sounds, the august chorus of heroes, the wail of slaves,
Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young people, accents of
 bargainers, 
Underneath these, possessing the words that never fail. 

To her children, the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never fail; 
The true words do not fail, for motion does not fail, and reflection does not fail; 
Also the day and night do not fail, and the voyage we pursue does not fail.

6
Of the interminable sisters, 
Of the ceaseless cotillions of sisters, 
Of the centripetal and centrifugal sisters, the elder and younger sisters, 
The beautiful sister we know dances on with the rest. 
With her ample back towards every beholder,
With the fascinations of youth, and the equal fascinations of age, 
Sits she whom I too love like the rest—sits undisturb’d, 
Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while her eyes glance back from
 it, 
Glance as she sits, inviting none, denying none, 
Holding a mirror day and night tirelessly before her own face.

7
Seen at hand, or seen at a distance, 
Duly the twenty-four appear in public every day, 
Duly approach and pass with their companions, or a companion, 
Looking from no countenances of their own, but from the countenances of those who are with
 them, 
From the countenances of children or women, or the manly countenance,
From the open countenances of animals, or from inanimate things, 
From the landscape or waters, or from the exquisite apparition of the sky, 
From our countenances, mine and yours, faithfully returning them, 
Every day in public appearing without fail, but never twice with the same companions. 

8
Embracing man, embracing all, proceed the three hundred and sixty-five resistlessly round
 the
 sun;
Embracing all, soothing, supporting, follow close three hundred and sixty-five offsets of
 the
 first,
 sure and necessary as they. 

9
Tumbling on steadily, nothing dreading, 
Sunshine, storm, cold, heat, forever withstanding, passing, carrying, 
The Soul’s realization and determination still inheriting, 
The fluid vacuum around and ahead still entering and dividing,
No balk retarding, no anchor anchoring, on no rock striking, 
Swift, glad, content, unbereav’d, nothing losing, 
Of all able and ready at any time to give strict account, 
The divine ship sails the divine sea. 

10
Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you;
The divine ship sails the divine sea for you. 

Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid, 
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky, 
For none more than you are the present and the past, 
For none more than you is immortality.

11
Each man to himself, and each woman to herself, such is the word of the past and present,
 and
 the
 word of immortality; 
No one can acquire for another—not one! 
Not one can grow for another—not one! 

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him; 
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him;
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him; 
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him; 
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him; 
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail; 
The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress, not to the audience;
And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own, or the indication of his
 own. 

12
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete! 
I swear the earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and
 broken! 
I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth! 
I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate the theory of the
 earth!
No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with
 the
 amplitude of the earth, 
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth. 

13
I swear I begin to see love with sweeter spasms than that which responds love! 
It is that which contains itself—which never invites, and never refuses. 

I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words!
I swear I think all merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth! 
Toward him who sings the songs of the Body, and of the truths of the earth; 
Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch. 

14
I swear I see what is better than to tell the best; 
It is always to leave the best untold.

When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot, 
My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, 
My breath will not be obedient to its organs, 
I become a dumb man. 

The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow—all or any is best;
It is not what you anticipated—it is cheaper, easier, nearer; 
Things are not dismiss’d from the places they held before; 
The earth is just as positive and direct as it was before; 
Facts, religions, improvements, politics, trades, are as real as before; 
But the Soul is also real,—it too is positive and direct;
No reasoning, no proof has establish’d it, 
Undeniable growth has establish’d it. 

15
This is a poem—a carol of words—these are hints of meanings, 
These are to echo the tones of Souls, and the phrases of Souls; 
If they did not echo the phrases of Souls, what were they then?
If they had not reference to you in especial, what were they then? 

I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best! 
I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold. 

16
Say on, sayers! 
Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth!
Work on—(it is materials you must bring, not breaths;) 
Work on, age after age! nothing is to be lost; 
It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use; 
When the materials are all prepared, the architects shall appear. 

I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail! I announce them and lead them;
I swear to you they will understand you, and justify you; 
I swear to you the greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all,
 and is
 faithful to all; 
I swear to you, he and the rest shall not forget you—they shall perceive that you are
 not
 an
 iota less than they; 
I swear to you, you shall be glorified in them.
Written by D. H. Lawrence | Create an image from this poem

Tortoise Shell

 The Cross, the Cross
Goes deeper in than we know,
Deeper into life;
Right into the marrow
And through the bone.
Along the back of the baby tortoise
The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,
Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections
Or a bee's.

Then crossways down his sides
Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.

Five, and five again, and five again,
And round the edges twenty-five little ones,
The sections of the baby tortoise shell.

Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.

It needed Pythagoras to see life playing with counters on the living back
Of the baby tortoise;
Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet,
Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise shell.

The first little mathematical gentleman
Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers
Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law.

Fives, and tens,
Threes and fours and twelves,
All the volte face of decimals,
The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven.

Turn him on his back,
The kicking little beetle,
And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly,
The long cleavage of division, upright of the eternal cross
And on either side count five,
On each side, two above, on each side, two below
The dark bar horizontal.

The Cross!
It goes right through him, the sprottling insect,
Through his cross-wise cloven psyche,
Through his five-fold complex-nature.

So turn him over on his toes again;
Four pin-point toes, and a problematical thumb-piece,
Four rowing limbs, and one wedge-balancing head,
Four and one makes five, which is the clue to all mathematics.

The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate
Of the baby tortoise.
Outward and visible indication of the plan within,
The complex, manifold involvednes,s of an individual creature
Plotted out
On this small bird, this rudiment,
This little dome, this pediment
Of all creation,
This slow one.


Written by Dylan Thomas | Create an image from this poem

Twenty-Four Years

 Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance as long as forever is.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

An Electric Sign Goes Dark

 POLAND, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork.

“Won’t you come and play wiz me” she sang … and “I just can’t make my eyes behave.”
“Higgeldy-Piggeldy,” “Papa’s Wife,” “Follow Me” were plays.

Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.

Twenty years old … thirty … forty …
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths in France.

A voice, a shape, gone.
A baby bundle from Warsaw … legs, torso, head … on a hotel bed at The Savoy.
The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses:
A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark.

She belonged to somebody, nobody.
No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand.
She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the white chiseling of arms and shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song.

Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine and tamarack of the Northwest, stock ranchers in the middle west, mayors of southern cities
Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Manitoba Childe Roland

 LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles over our house and whistling a wolf
song under the eaves.

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not
understand.

A man is crossing a big prairie, says the poem, and nothing happens—and he goes on and
on—and it’s all lonesome and empty and nobody home.

And he goes on and on—and nothing happens—and he comes on a horse’s skull, dry bones of a 
dead horse—and you know more than ever it’s all lonesome and empty and nobody home.

And the man raises a horn to his lips and blows—he fixes a proud neck and forehead toward 
the empty sky and the empty land—and blows one last wonder-cry.

And as the shuttling automatic memory of man clicks off its results willy-nilly and 
inevitable as the snick of a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 42-centimeter projectile,

I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts of Manitoba and Minnesota—in the 
sled derby run from Winnipeg to Minneapolis.

He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipeg—the lead dog is eaten by four team 
mates—and the man goes on and on—running while the other racers ride—running while the 
other racers sleep—

Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle of travel hour after hour—fighting 
the dogs who dig holes in the snow and whimper for sleep—pushing on—running and walking 
five hundred miles to the end of the race—almost a winner—one toe frozen, feet blistered 
and frost-bitten.

And I know why a thousand young men of the Northwest meet him in the finishing miles and 
yell cheers—I know why judges of the race call him a winner and give him a special prize 
even though he is a loser.

I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding heart amid the blizzards of five 
hundred miles that one last wonder-cry of Childe Roland—and I told the six-year-old girl 
all about it.

And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles and whistling a wolf song under the 
eaves, her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not 
understand.
Written by Vasko Popa | Create an image from this poem

The Prisoners Of The Little Box

 Open little box

We kiss your bottom and cover
Keyhole and key

The whole world lies crumpted in you
It resembles everything
Except itself

Not even your clear-sky mother
Would recognize it anymore

The rust will eat your key
Our world and us there inside
And finally you too

We kiss your four sides
And four corners
And twenty-four nails
And anything else you have

Open little box
Written by A E Housman | Create an image from this poem

The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux

 The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers 
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away, 
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers. 
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May. 

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot, 
One season ruined of your little store. 
May will be fine next year as like as not: 
But ay, but then we shall be twenty-four. 

We for a certainty are not the first 
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled 
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed 
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world. 

It is in truth iniquity on high 
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave, 
And mar the merriment as you and I 
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave. 

Iniquity it is; but pass the can. 
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore; 
Our only portion is the estate of man: 
We want the moon, but we shall get no more. 

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours 
To-morrow it will hie on far behests; 
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours 
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts. 

The troubles of our proud and angry dust 
Are from eternity, and shall not fail. 
Bear them we can, and if we can we must. 
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things