Poems

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Tragedy Poetry

This page is all about tragedy poetry. Tragedy has been a source of poetry ever since the world could write. Here I have a couple of tragedy poems from different times in history. The letters beside the lines indicate the rhyme schemes of the stanzas. __**//A Tragedy// by: [|Edith Nesbit](1858-1924) **__ Among his books he sits all day, (A) To think and read and write; (B) He does not smell the new-mown hay, (A) The roses red and white. (B)

I walk along them all alone, (A) His silly, stupid wife; (B) The world seems tasteless, dead and done – (A) An empty thing is life. (B)

At night his window casts a square, (A) Of light upon the lawn; (B) I sometimes walk and watch it there, (A) Until the chill of dawn. (B)

I have no brain to understand, (A) The books he loves to read; (B) I only have a heart and hand, (A) He does not seem to need. (B)

__**//Life's Tragedy// by: [|Paul Laurence Dunbar](1872-1906) **__

It may be misery not to sing at all, (A) And to go silent through the brimming day; (B) It may be misery never to be loved, (C) But deeper grieves than these beset the way. (B)

To sing the perfect song, (A) And by a half-tone lost the key, (B) There the potent sorrow, there the grief, (C) The pale, sad staring of Life's Tragedy. (B)

To have come near to the perfect love, (A) Not the hot passion of untempered youth, (B) But that which lies aside its vanity, (C) And gives, for thy trusting worship, truth. (B)

This, this indeed is to be accursed, (A) For if we mortals love, or if we sing, (B) We count our joys not by what we have, (C) But by what kept us from that perfect thing. (B)