Famous Growing Old Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Growing Old poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous growing old poems. These examples illustrate what a famous growing old poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...ountain's shadow enters Meipi lake. Fragrant rice; pecking; leaving surplus; parrots; grains; Emerald wutong; perching; growing old; phoenixes; branches. Beautiful women gather green feathers, talk to each other in spring, Immortal companions share a boat, move on in the evening. My coloured brush in olden days captured the image of life, My white head drones and gazes, bitterly hanging low....Read more of this...
by
Fu, Du
...at him.
He's not enormous, but one looks at him.
A little on the round if you insist,
For now, God save the mark, he's growing old;
He's five and forty, and to hear him talk
These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add
More years to that. He's old enough to be
The father of a world, and so he is.
"Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?"
Says he; and there shines out of him again
An aged light that has no age or station --
The mystery that's his -- a mischievous
...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...calls me, I must not delay."
He strides the saddle and he rides away.
II.
EVIRADNUS.
Eviradnus was growing old apace,
The weight of years had left its hoary trace,
But still of knights the most renowned was he,
Model of bravery and purity.
His blood he spared not; ready day or night
To punish crime, his dauntless sword shone bright
In his unblemished hand; holy and white
And loyal all his noble life had been,
A Christian Samson com...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...d becoming, rupturing the pleasant
Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the
scratched
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and
thunder."
She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country."
"But you can't do that--he hasn't even finished his spinach,"
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.
But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Succumbed to a s...Read more of this...
by
Ashbery, John
...In some summers there is so much fruit,
the peasants decide not to reap any more.
Not having reaped you, oh my days,
my nights, have I let the slow flames
of your lovely produce fall into ashes?
My nights, my days, you have borne so much!
All your branches have retained the gesture
of that long labor you are rising from:
my days, my nights. Oh my rustic f...Read more of this...
by
Rilke, Rainer Maria
...What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.
Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?
Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, '...Read more of this...
by
Arnold, Matthew
...ts three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who ju...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...his thought
The nearness of a profitable nook
That I could see. First I was half inclined
To caution him that he was growing old,
But something that was not compassion soon
Made plain the folly of all subterfuge.
Isaac was old, but not so old as that.
So I proposed, without an overture,
That we be seated in the shade a while,
And Isaac made no murmur. Soon the talk
Was turned on Archibald, and I began
To feel some premonitions of a kind
That only childhood knows; f...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...t
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and welth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me....Read more of this...
by
Hunt, James Henry Leigh
...Mine Enemy is growing old --
I have at last Revenge --
The Palate of the Hate departs --
If any would avenge
Let him be quick -- the Viand flits --
It is a faded Meat --
Anger as soon as fed is dead --
'Tis starving makes it fat --...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...se aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!
But why, you ask me, should this tale be told
To men grown old, or who are growing old?
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his "Characters of Men...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...England's shore,
Some day she'll hearken and she'll understand.)
A prima-donna in the shining past,
But now a mother growing old and gray,
She thinks of how she held a people fast
In thrall, and gleaned the triumphs of a day.
She sees a sea of faces like a dream;
She sees herself a queen of song once more;
She sees lips part in rapture, eyes agleam;
She sings as never once she sang before.
She sings a wild, sweet song that throbs with pain,
The added pain of life tha...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...Yup.
A long lazy September look
in the mirror
say it's true.
I'm 31
and my nose is growing
old.
It starts about 1/2
an inch
below the bridge
and strolls geriatrically
down
for another inch or so:
stopping.
Fortunately, the rest
of the nose is comparatively
young.
I wonder if girls
will want me with an
old nose.
I can hear them now
the heartless bitche...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying;
My dog and I are old, too old for roving.
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying,
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.
I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thiun ghost of music in the ...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...them one.
What else He give or keep
God grant me - no, not here,
For I am not so bold
To hope a thing so dear
Now I am growing old,
But when, if the tale's true,
The Pestle of the moon
That pounds up all anew
Brings me to birth again --
To find what once I had
And know what once I have known,
Until I am driven mad,
Sleep driven from my bed.
By tenderness and care.
pity, an aching head,
Gnashing of teeth, despair;
And all because of some one
perverse creature of chance,
And l...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...ction.
Don't take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it's time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I'm passing through a phase:
gradually I'm changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours:
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust....Read more of this...
by
Kunitz, Stanley
...o get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and welth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me....Read more of this...
by
Hunt, James Henry Leigh
...was not strange
We thought that love could never change.
But I can tell--let truth be told--
That love will change in growing old;
Though day by day is naught to see,
So delicate his motions be.
And in the end 'twill come to pass
Quite to forget what once he was,
Nor even in fancy to recall
The pleasure that was all in all.
His little spring, that sweet we found,
So deep in summer floods is drowned,
I wonder, bathed in joy complete,
How love so young could be so sweet....Read more of this...
by
Bridges, Robert Seymour
...ike hers?--What can I do for the child? I gaze at her and wonder
what sort of man
In the fall of the world . . . I am growing old, that is the trouble. My chil-
dren and little grandchildren
Will find their way, and why should I wait ten years yet, having lived sixty-
seven, ten years more or less,
Before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die snapping, like a wolf
Who has lost his mate?--I am bound by my own thirty-year-old decision:
who drinks the wine
Should take the ...Read more of this...
by
Jeffers, Robinson
...The night too quickly passes
And we are growing old,
So let us fill our glasses
And toast the Days of Gold;
When finds of wondrous treasure
Set all the South ablaze,
And you and I were faithful mates
All through the roaring days!
Then stately ships came sailing
From every harbour's mouth,
And sought the land of promise
That beaconed in the South;
Then southward streamed their streamers...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
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