Fletcher John 1579-1625
The Bloody Brother
Best while you have it use your breath,
There is no drinking after death.
Goldsmith Oliver 1730-1774
The Deserted Village
Ill fares the land, to hast' ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destrouyed, can never be supplied.
Gray Thomas 1716-1771
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of death?
Keats John 1795-1821
‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art'
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death.
Lowell Robert 1917-1977
‘Our Afterlife I'
After fifty
the clock can't stop,
each saving breath
takes something.
Pope Alexander 1688-1744
Eloisa to Abelard
See my lips tremble, and my eyeballs roll,
Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul!
Rossetti Dante Gabriel 1828-1882
The House of Life ‘Lost Days'
I do not see them here; but after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see,
Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.
Woolf Virginia 1882-1941
(of E.M. Forster)
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Anonymous
(sign on lawn, University of Iowa)
If allowed to survive, this grass will produce enough oxygen for two students to breathe for one semester.
King Benjamin Franklin 1857-1894
‘The Pessimist'
Nothing to do but work,
Nothing to eat but food,
Nothing to wear but clothes
To keep one from going nude.
Nothing to breathe but air,
Quick as a flash ‘t is gone;
Nowhere to fall but off,
Nowhere to stand but on.
Milton John 1608-1674
Paradise Lost
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight.
Moore Thomas 1779-1852
‘Oh! breathe not his name'
Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid.
Pope Alexander 1688-1744
The Rape of the Lock
Not louder shrieks to pitying heav'n are cast,
When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last.
Tennyson Alfred Lord 1809-1892
‘Ulysses'
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life.