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
- My Lady in Her White Silk Shawl by Vachel Lindsay
- Sonnet To A Young Lady On Her Birth-Day by William Cowper
- Sonnet CXLVI by William Shakespeare
- To Victory by Siegfried Sassoon
- Love’s Gleaning Tide by William Morris
- Unstitching by Satish Verma
- As Dies The Year poem – Alfred Austin
- In Absence. by Sidney Lanier
- In Memory Of My Mother by Patrick Kavanagh
- Федор Сологуб – Своеволием рока
- Election Ballad at close of Contest for representing the Dumfries Burghs, 1790 by Robert Burns
- Иван Мятлев – Сельское хозяйство
- A Perfect World by Robby Charters
- Владимир Орлов – Где петушок носит гребешок
- The Dunciad: Book III. poem – Alexander Pope
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.