Top 100 Poetry Death Quotes
#1. Life is first boredom, then fear.
whether or not we use it, it goes,
and leaves what something hidden from us chose,
and age, and then the only end of age.
Philip Larkin
#2. Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven's mouth.
Aberjhani
#3. Some have won a wild delight,
By daring wilder sorrow;
Could I gain thy love to-night,
I'd hazard death to-morrow.
Charlotte Bronte
#4. Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
Edgar Allan Poe
#5. I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground
Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound.
Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death
With holy Paul; lest it be thought the breath
Of discontent; or that these prayers be
For weariness of life, not love of thee.
Ben Jonson
#6. That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#7. Life into death
Life's other shape,
No rupture,
Only crossing.
Dejan Stojanovic
#8. The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride,
Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide,
Earth a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true,
And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.
Emily Dickinson
#9. Aflame in black ecstasy, orders extinguished:
after death
how will I know my love was true,
this sacrifice not an exercise in vanity?
Phan Ming Yen
#10. Violence can read like poetry. You just have to describe the act as if you're in love with the way your characters bleed.
F.K. Preston
#11. they told her, "fear the reaper."
she laughed to herself and muttered, 'baby, death ain't nothing' more than a quick fuck.
a little bit of silence after he comes.
Taylor Rhodes
#12. Old McDonald had a restaurant,
E, I, E, I, O,
And in that restaurant was some beef,
E, I, E, I, O,
With a moo moo here,
And a moo moo there.
Here a moo, there a moo,
Everywhere a moo moo cholesterol filled death trap burger.
Harry Whitewolf
#13. The red washing
down the bathtub
can't change the color of the sea
at all.
Derrick Brown
#14. I leave you, to go the road we all must go. The road I would choose, if only I could, is the other.
Murasaki Shikibu
#15. I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
Adrienne Rich
#16. No mark survives this place: you too will yield
to unmemory.
Mathew Henderson
#17. We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
#18. As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death."
Andrew Davies
#19. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#20. Honor Lost
Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ...
Muse
#21. It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.
Jenny Holzer
#22. the song of the dead
heavy as rain
on the wide banana leaves
hard as drums
Antonio Cisneros
#23. The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe
#24. My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane.
F.K. Preston
#26. We all must face death and walk with it. But we also must love and live in it.
Rolando Mithcell
#27. At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
Federico Garcia Lorca
#28. Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.
Don DeLillo
#29. This my personal death? -
That my lungs be failing
To inhale the breath
Others are exhaling?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#30. Oh the stellar sensation,
Oh the cosmic elevation;
Time is sober in death,
For the wine of love;
Is the blue life of the earth.
Stephan Attia
#31. Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet.
Allen Ginsberg
#32. . . . distant as the death of grocery chickens.
Rodney Jones
#33. She was the death of me,
the beginning and the end.
And I never understood her,
for how could someone
So beautiful be the cause
of so much destruction
after all.
Robert M. Drake
#34. The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,
The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity
Emily Dickinson
#35. I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Billy Collins
#36. This world
that was our home
for a brief spell
never brought us anything
but pain and grief;
its a shame that not one of our problems
was ever solved.
We depart
with a thousand regrets
in our hearts.
Omar Khayyam
#37. Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with the
floating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I'm sad they're gone ... sad and blue.
Nicholaus Patnaude
#38. Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
Louise Gluck
#40. Through the darkest hours of the night
and through the dreamers realm I seek,
Far beyond the starry sky
and beyond galaxies I am free.
Through the grimmest memories
and past a seasons air I cannot breathe,
Far beyond this mortal world
in an afterlife we shall meet.
Lee Argus
#41. The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Sylvia Plath
#42. I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Ezra Pound
#44. The worst thing," he told me,
"is bitterness, people end up so
bitter.
Charles Bukowski
#45. Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
May Sarton
#46. I don't know where I find the air and I keep getting the words wrong: From out our bourne of death and space the flood will wash me far- but it doesn't even matter. I never knew that words might not matter.
Ally Condie
#47. I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living.
F.K. Preston
#48. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
#49. In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.
John Clare
#50. And I am weary of the anguish
Increasing winters bear;
Weary to watch the spirit languish
Through years of dead despair.
So, if a tear, when thou art dying,
Should haply fall from me,
It is but that my soul is sighing,
To go and rest with thee.
Emily Bronte
#51. Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,
When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,
Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,
But never will be sung to us again,
Is they remembrance. Now the hour of rest
Hath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#52. What is this slow blue dream of living,
and this fevered death by dreaming?
Aberjhani
#53. Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.
Seamus Heaney
#54. No one knows here, that the Death is actually, Actually to Born.
Samar Sudha
#56. Some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we're all alive
tonight.
Charles Bukowski
#58. No more coming home as to a death sentence.
No more leaving after this leaving.
Boey Kim Cheng
#59. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#60. I take this continent with me into the grave.
Ray Bradbury
#61. And Death it calls as the stone crow breaks. Streaks of blood malform its face.
Death becomes its withered eyes and the shadows whisper, "Lies."
Excerpt from "Lies
Angela B. Chrysler
#62. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#63.
Who knows what death, anxiety of the living,
Who knows what loneliness, end of the loving
I could say to myself of the love (I had):
Let it not be immortal, since it is flame
But let it be infinite while it lasts.
Vinicius De Moraes
#64. A poetess is a collection of unfinished thoughts. She is a tormented phantom, a harbinger of life and death. Those who peer deep inside her catacombs will learn that even madness is a virtue.
Nichole McElhaney
#65. Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death.
Santosh Kalwar
#66. If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably.
Sara Teasdale
#67. Parting
One is strong, a child now grown
The other weak, a parent aged
-
The strong once feeble
The weak once mighty
-
Time, the infinity
has marked them ...
Muse
#68. even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like.
N'Zuri Za Austin
#69. What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
Erica Jong
#71. And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shallot.
Alfred Tennyson
#72. I fain would follow love, if that could be;
I needs must follow death, who calls for me;
Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.
Alfred Tennyson
#73. O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!
William Shakespeare
#74. Dying only means moving into a nicer house.
We have only gone into the next room.
We still are what we have always been.
We aren't far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.
Kerry Okines
#75. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#76. The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
William Butler Yeats
#78. The will of life and death,
never share the same motivation ...
we all know that love is the ultimate motive to die for ...
but let's not kid ourselves ...
... we all know the ultimate motive to rise back from the dead is vengeance.
Non Nomen
#79. Inside a home you left me, a blue orphanage.
Inside a bluish mosaic, space to live.
Heng Siok Tian
#81. My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.
Philip Schultz
#82. Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak.
Kelly Moran
#84. I can't pray or weigh my words right; doomsday
is here my friend, but you're immune. We suffer
for you. I'm weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads;
a souvenir so you'll never forget your friends.
Jalina Mhyana
#85. But that's life. We wander around like blind mice searching for whatever it is we're looking for. From mice to miserable men, from the poetry of childhood's hour to the darkness of death's goddamn dominion, we never stop searching. Why can't we just be?
Gregory Hughes
#86. When I shut my eyes on this world I'll finally have peace.
Kevin Walker
#87. Because Dad told you he'd be here forever.
Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.
Kwame Alexander
#88. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#89. Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.
Mahmoud Darwish
#90. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#92. forge forever on
tho' dark death rewards us all
forge forever on
Kurt Brindley
#93. Nature is bent on new beginning
and death has not a chance of winning ...
Rosy Cole
#95. I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.
Charles Bukowski
#96. Let me live my final days whole.
Let my memory remain that I might know love's face.
Life don't unwrap me to be fed to scavengers.
I want to escape into light - not exist in darkness.
Susie Clevenger
#97. I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.
Charles Bukowski
#98. All paths lead to death,
our premature sacrifice for future spawn
(from Elixir)
Bryan Murphy
#99. I have no life but this,
To lead it here;
Nor any death, but lest
Dispelled from there;
Nor tie to earths to come,
Nor action new,
Except through this extent,
The realm of you.
Emily Dickinson
#100. SOME PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE. GET USED TO IT. QUESTION MARK.
Amy King
