When Your Pants Begin to Go by Henry Lawson

When you wear a cloudy collar and a shirt that isn’t white,
And you cannot sleep for thinking how you’ll reach to-morrow night,
You may be a man of sorrows, and on speaking terms with Care,
And as yet be unacquainted with the Demon of Despair;
For I rather think that nothing heaps the trouble on your mind
Like the knowledge that your trousers badly need a patch behind.

I have noticed when misfortune strikes the hero of the play,
That his clothes are worn and tattered in a most unlikely way;
And the gods applaud and cheer him while he whines and loafs around,
And they never seem to notice that his pants are mostly sound;
But, of course, he cannot help it, for our mirth would mock his care,
If the ceiling of his trousers showed the patches of repair.

Read more

September 24, 2009 · Posted in Sympathy Poems  
    

The Vagabond by Henry Lawson

White handkerchiefs wave from the short black pier
As we glide to the grand old sea –
But the song of my heart is for none to hear
If one of them waves for me.
A roving, roaming life is mine,
Ever by field or flood –
For not far back in my father’s line
Was a dash of the Gipsy blood.

Flax and tussock and fern,
Gum and mulga and sand,
Reef and palm — but my fancies turn
Ever away from land;
Strange wild cities in ancient state,
Range and river and tree,
Snow and ice. But my star of fate
Is ever across the sea.

Read more

September 22, 2009 · Posted in Sympathy Poems  
    

Portrait of a Lady by T. S. Eliot

Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

The Jew of Malta.

Read more

September 21, 2009 · Posted in Sympathy Poems  
    

The Cambaroora Star by Henry Lawson

So you’re writing for a paper? Well, it’s nothing very new
To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw;
You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are,
But you’ll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR.
Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce,
I myself — you mayn’t believe it — helped to run a paper once
With a chap on Cambaroora, by the name of Charlie Brown,
And I’ll tell you all about it if you’ll take the story down.

Read more

September 19, 2009 · Posted in Sympathy Poems  
    

Celestial Love by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Higher far,
Upward, into the pure realm,
Over sun or star,
Over the flickering demon film,
Thou must mount for love,—
Into vision which all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel,
On which all beings ride,
Visibly revolves;
Where the starred eternal worm
Girds the world with bound and term;
Where unlike things are like,
When good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.
Read more

September 17, 2009 · Posted in Sympathy Poems  
    

September 15, 2009 · Posted in Sympathy Cards  
    

Next Page »