Continuing to live — that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries —
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise —
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Constancy To An Ideal Object by Samuel Coleridge
- Николай Некрасов – Великодушный поступок
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – На берегу
- Rain After a Vaudeville Show by Stephen Vincent Benet
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня Геращенко
- calling-the-spirits.html
- Ольга Седакова – Элегия осенней воды
- Sonnet CXLIII by William Shakespeare
- My Boy Jack by Rudyard Kipling
- Robert Burns: Jerusalem Tavern, Dumfries.: Inscription On A Goblet
- Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi
- Paradise Lost: Book 02 poem – John Milton poems
- On the Beach at Night, Alone. by Walt Whitman
- The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken by Vachel Lindsay
- The Power of Armies is a Visible Thing by William Wordsworth
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985), Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Cavalier of the Order of the Companions of Honour, was an English poet, novelist, and librarian.