Seasons of Life

by COLLINS, NIGELHERRICK, JIM

• ISBN13: 9781573927710
• ISBN10: 1573927716
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2000-02-01
• Publisher: Prometheus Books

Summary

This remarkable anthology of poems and prose on the human condition brings together a wide range of romantic and humanist thought from around the world. The editors have selected some of the most powerful poems and meditations from Maya Angelou, W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings, Albert Camus, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Epicurus, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Thomas Hardy, Robert Herrick, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, John Lennon, Lucretius, Ogden Nash, Thomas Paine, Sylvia Plath, Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, Sappho, Seneca, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, and many other notables. Seasons of Life can be enjoyed independently or as a useful complement to various ceremonies, such as births, graduations, weddings, celebrations, funerals, and much more.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xxxi
Foreword	xxxv
Tony Harrison
Introduction	xxxix
Nigel Collins
Part 1: The Newborn
The coming of a child	1	(1)
David H. MacPherson
Behold the child, the visitor (from Man Is the Meaning)	2	(1)
Kenneth L. Patton
The Little People	3	(1)
John Greenleaf Whittier
from spiralling ecstatically this	4	(1)
e. e. cummings
Born Yesterday	5	(1)
Philip Larkin
Riders	6	(1)
Robert Frost
The Newborn (excerpt)	7	(1)
Cecil Day-Lewis
Birth	8	(1)
Langston Hughes
To My Son	8	(1)
Siegfried Sassoon
Woman to Child	9	(1)
Judith Wright
Part 2: Children
The Gift	10	(1)
Rabindranath Tagore
Nothing is strange to a child for whom everything is new (from This World, My Home)	11	(1)
Kenneth L. Patton
Learning to Talk	12	(1)
Cecil Day-Lewis
Evolution	13	(1)
John B. Tabb
The spirits of children are remote and wise (from Ode on the whole duty of Parents)	13	(1)
Frances Cornford
The Woman with the Baby to the Philosopher	14	(1)
Frances Cornford
A Wish for My Children	14	(1)
Evangeline Paterson
Part 3: The Future
I Have Seen...	15	(1)
Anonymous
The Zulu Girl	16	(1)
Roy Campbell
What have I got exactly? (from The Firstborn)	17	(1)
Laurie Lee
Your children are not your children (from The Prophet)	18	(1)
Kahlil Gibran
For the gift of childhood	19	(1)
Donal Johnston
If a child lives with tolerance	19	(1)
Dorothy Law Nolte
We are mindful that within each child	19	(1)
Fred A. Cappuccino
Let our children learn to be honest	20	(1)
A. Powell Davies
On the Seashore	21	(1)
Rabindranath Tagore
Now this is the day	22	(1)
Zuni Indians
For the gift of childhood	22	(1)
Anonymous
A Prayer for My Daughter (excerpt)	23	(1)
William Butler Yeats
Part 4: Love Poems Past
The Confirmation	24	(1)
Edwin Muir
Sonnet	25	(1)
Christina Rossetti
The Bargain	26	(1)
Sir Philip Sidney
To-----	27	(1)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Sonnets from the Portuguese XLIII	28	(1)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
No, No, Fair Heretic	29	(1)
Sir John Suckling
The Good Morrow	30	(1)
John Donne
Sonnet 116	31	(1)
William Shakespeare
Love Is Not All	32	(1)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Union of You and Me	33	(1)
Rabindranath Tagore
On Friendship	34	(1)
Kahlil Gibran
Oh Tell Me the Truth about Love (from Twelve Songs)	35	(2)
W. H. Auden
Part 5: Love Poems Present
I Love You...	37	(1)
Anonymous
Strawberries	38	(1)
Edwin Morgan
i carry your heart with me	39	(1)
e. e. cummings
Love Poem	40	(1)
Elizabeth Jennings
Notes on Love and Courage	41	(1)
Hugh Prather
By Loch Etive	42	(1)
Bryan Guinness
Stars May Fall in One's Hand	43	(1)
A. S. J. Tessimond
Love Comes Quietly	43	(1)
Robert Creeley
So What Is Love?	44	(1)
Maria Lovell
This Is to Let You Know	45	(1)
Noel Coward
When I Hear Your Name	46	(1)
Gloria Fuertes
The Sun Has Burst the Sky	47	(1)
Jenny Joseph
The Orange	48	(1)
Wendy Cope
People	48	(1)
Charlotte Zolotow
Part 6: Weddings: The Occasion and Its Intentions
Epithalmion	49	(2)
Dannie Abse
Look to this day	51	(1)
Anonymous
Gathering	52	(1)
William H. Matchett
True Ways of Knowing	53	(1)
Norman MacCaig
Wish for a Young Wife	54	(1)
Theodore Roethke
You are part of me	54	(1)
Frank Yerby
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven	55	(1)
William Butler Yeats
Sometimes	56	(1)
Sheenagh Pugh
For an Unborn Baby	57	(1)
Janet Shepperson
Part 7: Wedding Toasts
Honour, riches, marriage-blessings (from The Tempest)	58	(1)
William Shakespeare
The peace of the running water to you	59	(1)
Celtic Benediction
Now you will feel no rain Native American wedding ceremoney	59	(1)
Part 8: The Art of Marriage
A Successful Marriage	60	(1)
Paul Kurtz
It Is Not Enough to Love Passionately; You Must Also Love Well (from The Honey Bee)	61	(1)
Anatole France
We are each a secret to the other (from Memoirs of Childhood and Youth)	62	(1)
Albert Schweitzer
Why you love someone (from Gift from the Sea)	63	(1)
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
To love one another (from Footprints on the Path)	64	(1)
Eileen Caddy
The Art of a Good Marriage	64	(1)
Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Love Will Not Be Constrained by Mastery (from The Canterbury Tales)	65	(1)
Geoffrey Chaucer
Advice	66	(1)
Ogden Nash
The Owl and the Pussycat	67	(1)
Edward Lear
I Will Make You Brooches	68	(1)
Robert Louis Stevenson
Tin Wedding Whistle	68	(2)
Ogden Nash
Valentine	70	(1)
Carol Ann Duffy
Part 9: The Natural World
Leave this world, Nature says, as you entered here	71	(1)
Lucretius
For I have learned (from ``Tintern Abbey'')	72	(1)
William Wordsworth
The Glory of the Garden	73	(1)
Rudyard Kipling
Cats	74	(1)
A. S. J. Tessimond
For a Good Dog	75	(1)
Ogden Nash
Death is not The End	76	(1)
Peter Tatchell
In Hardwood Groves	77	(1)
Robert Frost
Lake Isle of Innisfree	77	(1)
William Butler Yeats
Regret Not Me	78	(2)
Thomas Hardy
Part 10: Outlooks and Ideals
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us (from Letter to Menoeceus)	80	(1)
Epicurus
A Humanist Credo	81	(1)
Anonymous
A little while and you will be nobody and nowhere	82	(1)
Marcus Aurelius
This is the true joy of life	82	(1)
George Bernard Shaw
This life is short	83	(1)
Swami Vivekananda
This is what you shall do (from the preface to Leaves of Grass)	83	(1)
Walt Whitman
Like nearly all the intellectuals of this generation, we are fundamentally political in thought and action (from ``On Roger Fry'')	84	(1)
Julian Bell
O may I join the choir invisible	85	(1)
George Eliot
A Loftier Race	86	(1)
John Addington Symonds
Of Society and Civilisation (from Rights of Man)	87	(1)
Thomas Paine
Those who live nobly	88	(1)
Bertrand Russell
I believe that society is better than chaos (from Civilisation)	88	(1)
Sir Kenneth Clark
A Saying	89	(1)
Mahatma Gandhi
I think continually of those who were truly great	89	(1)
Stephen Spender
Time	90	(1)
Bhartrihari
The Tree of Life (from The Falcon and the Dove)	91	(1)
Herbert Read
The Life of Humans	92	(1)
Margaret Laws Smith
Man's dearest possession is life (from How the Steel Was Tempered)	93	(1)
Nikolai Alekseyevich Ostrovski
Each one of us can help in the glorious task	93	(1)
Anonymous
The Religiousness of Science (from The World As I See It)	94	(1)
Albert Einstein
Part 11: Time and the Seasons of Life
I Have a Rendezvous with Death	95	(1)
Alan Seeger
At the Last Breath	96	(1)
Thomas Hardy
Heredity	97	(1)
Thomas Hardy
The Lapse of the Year	98	(1)
William Morris
From too much love of living (from ``The Garden of Proserpine'')	99	(1)
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate (from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)	100	(1)
Omar Khayyam
Cities and Thrones and Powers	101	(1)
Rudyard Kipling
Even as night darkens the green earth	102	(1)
Zen saying
Lights Out	102	(1)
Edward Thomas
The Gate A-Fallen To	103	(2)
William Barnes
Out of the earth to rest or range (from ``Passing Strange'')	105	(1)
John Masefield
Oh, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears (from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)	106	(1)
Omar Khayyam
In my view death is simply one of the many kinds of tragedy that human beings encounter	107	(1)
Corliss Lamont
The Human Seasons	107	(1)
John Keats
Part 12: Beginnings
Is it so small a thing (from ``The Hymn of Empedocles'')	108	(1)
Matthew Arnold
Hotel Eternity (from Some Lives!---A GP's East End)	109	(1)
David Widgery
Knowledge	109	(1)
Henry David Thoreau
All things to nothingness descend (from ``Chronicle of the Norman Dukes'')	110	(1)
Master Wace
So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us (from ``Letter to Menoeceus'')	110	(1)
Epicurus
To plunge upwards is the way of the spark (from Cursory Rhymes)	110	(1)
Humbert Wolfe
But of this I still feel certain (from The Story of Winifred Holtby)	111	(1)
Vera Brittain
No man is an island, entire of itself (from Prayers Upon Emergent Occasions)	111	(1)
John Donne
I was not and was conceived	111	(1)
W. K. Clifford
Death (from Reflections)	112	(1)
Herman Hesse
Part 13: Readiness Is All
The readiness is all (from Hamlet 5.2)	113	(1)
William Shakespeare
Death must simply become the discreet but dignified exit (from The Hour of Our Death)	113	(1)
Philippe Aries
If the world is not to last for ever (from Perseus in the Wind)	114	(1)
Freya Stark
To me the Muses truly gave	115	(1)
Sappho
But death deserved or undeserved (from ``A Matter of Life and Death'')	115	(1)
Kit Mouat
What if some little pain the passage have (from The Faerie Queen)	116	(1)
Edmund Spenser
Truth	116	(1)
John Masefield
Life in itself is neither good or bad (from On Learning How to Die)	117	(1)
Michel de Montaigne
Greedy time feeds on all	118	(1)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Death's debt that everybody owes (from Palladas: Poems)	119	(1)
Tony Harrison
Fare Well	120	(1)
Walter de la Mare
Dear Lovely Death	121	(1)
Langston Hughes
No single thing abides; but all things flow (from On the Nature of Things)	122	(1)
Lucretius
Invictus	123	(1)
W. E. Henley
Integer Vitae	124	(1)
Thomas Campion
When you start on your journey to Ithaca (from ``Setting Out on the Voyage to Ithaca'')	125	(1)
Constantine P. Cavafy
Part 14: Remember Me...
Death hides no secret (from ``Love Lines of Dying'')	126	(1)
Norbert Elias
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead	127	(1)
Callimachus
Music I heard with you was more than music (from ``Discordants'')	127	(1)
Conrad Aiken
Remember	128	(1)
Christina Rossetti
The Going	128	(2)
Thomas Hardy
Epitaph on My Father	130	(1)
Robert Burns
Simplify Me When I'm Dead	130	(2)
Keith Douglas
Afterwards	132	(1)
Thomas Hardy
A Poem	133	(1)
Edna O'Brien
in times of daffodils	134	(1)
e. e. cummings
However far back you go in your memory (from Dr. Zhivago)	135	(1)
Boris Pasternak
Song	136	(1)
Christina Rossetti
For Andrew Wood	137	(1)
James Fenton
If it must be (from Poems of Resistance)	138	(1)
Martin Carter
Tam Tari Capitis	138	(1)
Louis MacNeice
Image of a Man	139	(1)
Norman MacCaig
The Light of Other Days	140	(1)
Thomas Moore
The Dead	141	(1)
Rupert Brooke
Part 15: Acceptance
Run then through this little space of time	142	(1)
Anonymous
Dirge without Music	143	(1)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Mortal man, you have been a citizen in this great City (from Meditations)	144	(1)
Marcus Aurelius
And yet how should I prove that death is not to be feared (from The Way of Dying Well)	144	(1)
Thomas Lupset
Then a woman said, ``Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow'' (from The Prophet)	145	(1)
Kahlil Gibran
From a place I came (from ``Two Invocations of Death'')	146	(1)
Kathleen Raine
Acceptance	147	(1)
Robert Frost
An individual human existence should be like a river	147	(1)
Bertrand Russell
Not for That City	148	(1)
Charlotte Mew
All men dream: but not equally (from Seven Pillars of Wisdom)	148	(1)
T. E. Lawrence
Ivory	149	(1)
Simon Armitage
Snuffing Zone	150	(1)
Anthony Barnes
No Mourning, By Request	151	(1)
Winifred Holtby
The comfort of having a friend	152	(1)
Anonymous
The Journey of Life	152	(1)
Sir Winston Churchill
Part 16: Love and Death
At times like this	153	(1)
David Lott
Fragment: Amor Aeternus	154	(1)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Absence	155	(1)
Elizabeth Jennings
Hands	155	(1)
Barbara Castle
For Those Once Mine	156	(1)
George Santayana
Code Poem for the French Resistance	156	(1)
Leo Marks
I thought once how Theocritus had sung (from Sonnets from the Portuguese)	157	(1)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnet	158	(1)
John Keats
Eternal Love	159	(1)
John La Corte
Saying Goodbye to My Father	160	(1)
Gillian Woodward
For a Gentle Friend	161	(1)
Elizabeth Jennings
Part 17: Untimely Deaths
A Lily of a Day	162	(1)
Ben Jonson
Doomed to know not Winter	163	(1)
Robert Louis Stevenson
He has outsoared the shadow of our night (from Adonais)	163	(1)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Some people are bound to die young	164	(1)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
H-----laughter was better than birds in the morning (from A Time to Dance)	164	(1)
Cecil Day-Lewis
Victory over Death	165	(1)
Vera Brittain
On the Death of a Child	165	(1)
D. J. Enright
Fair daffodils	166	(1)
Robert Herrick
For a Child Born Dead	167	(1)
Elizabeth Jennings
The Origin of Music (from Remembrance of Crimes Past)	168	(1)
Dannie Abse
So Many Different Lengths of Time	169	(1)
Brian Patten
Nothing Gold Can Stay	170	(1)
Robert Frost
Let Me Die a Youngman's Death	171	(1)
Roger McGough
Part 18: Suicide
If the room is smoky	172	(1)
Epictetus
If I can choose	172	(1)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
On Suicide	173	(1)
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Double Autumn	173	(1)
James Reeves
Heaven-Haven	173	(1)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Each and every one of us stands in a peculiar and unique relationship to life	174	(1)
Eike-Henner Kluge
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon (from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)	174	(1)
Omar Khayyam
Why Do I...	175	(1)
Stevie Smith
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide (from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)	176	(1)
Albert Camus
The Road Not Taken	177	(1)
Robert Frost
The World's a Stage	178	(1)
Hilaire Belloc
Part 19: Committal Poems
I have got my leave (from Gitanjali XCIII)	179	(1)
Rabindranath Tagore
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife	180	(1)
Walter Savage Landor
His life was gentle (from Julius Caesar 5.5)	180	(1)
William Shakespeare
On Middleton Edge	181	(1)
Andrew Young
I came unknowing what the light would show	181	(1)
Harry Bell
Envoi	181	(1)
Ernest Dowson
Parta Quies	182	(1)
A. E. Housman
Clouds	182	(1)
Rupert Brooke
Our revels are now ended (from The Tempest)	183	(1)
William Shakespeare
Everyone Sang	183	(1)
Siegried Sassoon
Take me to some high place of heather (from ``The Joy of Living'')	184	(1)
Ewan MacColl
I fall asleep in the full and certain hope	184	(1)
Samuel Butler
Do not stand at my grave and weep	185	(1)
Anonymous
Turn Again to Life	185	(1)
Mary Lee Hall
Some would go down by the sunlit sea (from Unfettered)	186	(1)
Will Lawson
Part 20: Envois
That such have died	187	(1)
Emily Dickinson
Farewell	187	(1)
Anne Bronte
Farewell	188	(1)
Stevie Smith
To a Descendant	189	(1)
Lorna Wood
If I Should Go Before the Rest of You (from Joyce by Herself and Her Friends)	189	(1)
Joyce Grenfell
He has completed his voyage From the Dhammapada	190	(1)
Last Lines for a Materialist Anonymous	191	(1)
What Is Success?	192	(1)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And Death Shall Have No Dominion	193	(1)
Dylan Thomas
But pleasures are like poppies spread (from Tam O'Shanter)	194	(1)
Robert Burns
But now the journey is over	194
Constantine P. Cavafy