Happiness poems
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Wedding Wind
© Philip Larkin
The wind blew all my wedding-day,
And my wedding-night was the night of the high wind;
And a stable door was banging, again and again,
That he must go and shut it, leaving me
Mother, Summer, I
© Philip Larkin
My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
High Windows
© Philip Larkin
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
The Loom Of Dreams
© Arthur Symons
I broider the world upon a loom,
I broider with dreams my tapestry;
Here in a little lonely room
I am master of earth and sea,
And the planets come to me.
Sonnet XXXIII: Whilst Yet Mine Eyes
© Michael Drayton
To ImaginationWhilst yet mine Eyes do surfeit with delight,
My woeful Heart, imprison'd in my breast,
Wisheth to be transformed to my sight,
That it, like these, by looking might be blest.
Carol Of Occupations
© Walt Whitman
COME closer to me;
Push close, my lovers, and take the best I possess;
Yield closer and closer, and give me the best you possess.
Onions
© William Matthews
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
The Nocturne: Address to the Sunset
© Robert Nichols
Exquisite stillness! What serenities
Of earth and air! How bright atop the wall
Sonnet XLIX: How Long
© Samuel Daniel
How long shall I in mine affliction mourn,
A burden to myself, distress'd in mind?
Sordello: Book the Fourth
© Robert Browning
Meantime Ferrara lay in rueful case;
The lady-city, for whose sole embrace
Thoughts in a Garden
© Andrew Marvell
HOW vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
And their uncessant labours see
Crown'd from some single herb or tree,
The Child Of The Islands - Winter
© Caroline Norton
I.
ERE the Night cometh! On how many graves
Rests, at this hour, their first cold winter's snow!
Wild o'er the earth the sleety tempest raves;
The Garden
© Andrew Marvell
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes;
And their uncessant Labours see
Crown'd from some single Herb or Tree,
Paraphrase Of The First Psalm
© Robert Burns
The man, in life wherever plac'd,
Hath happiness in store,
Who walks not in the wicked's way,
Nor learns their guilty lore!
The Star-Apple Kingdom
© Derek Walcott
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
Dark August
© Derek Walcott
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.
To A Distant Friend
© William Wordsworth
Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?
Memorial Day For The War Dead
© Yehuda Amichai
Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.
