from Essays / Montaigne -- "Death be not proud" / John Donne -- "Timor mortis conturbat me" / Anonymous -- from A margin of hope / Irving Howe -- from "The tower" ; from "Sailing to Byzantium" / W.B. Yeats -- "Lines written on the eve of a birthday" / Kelly Cherry -- from Gulliver's travels / Jonathan Swift -- from Macbeth ; from As you like it / William Shakespeare -- from "Sonnet on turning twenty-three" / John Milton -- from "On being twenty-six" / Philip Larkin -- from "On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year" / George Gordon, Lord Byron -- from On old age / Cicero.
from "Rabbi Ben Ezra" / Robert Browning -- Letter to Malcolm Cowley / Kenneth Burke -- from The view from 80 / Malcolm Cowley -- "This is what human beauty comes to" / François Villon -- from Satire X / Juvenal -- from Epistolae morales / Seneca -- from The Canterbury tales / Geoffrey Chaucer -- "The problem, unstated till now, is how" ; "It's true, these last few years I've lived" / Adrienne Rich -- "One art" / Elizabeth Bishop -- from Self-consciousness : a memoir / John Updike -- from "The vanity of human wishes" / Samuel Johnson -- "Dear Charles, my muse, asleep or dead" / Philip Larkin -- from "St. Mark's rest" / John Ruskin -- "Yes; I write verses now and then" / Walter Savage Landor -- from "Used : the mind-body problem" / Kelly Cherry -- "As I sit writing here" ; "Queries to my seventieth year" / Walt Whitman -- Letter to Malcolm Cowley / Kenneth Burke -- "It is time" / Laurence Lerner -- "Extempore effusion upon the death of James Hogg" / William Wordsworth -- From Childe Harold's pilgrimage / George Gordon, Lord Byron -- "The old familiar faces" / Charles Lamb -- Letter to Malcolm Cowley / Kenneth Burke -- from "A toccata of Galuppi's" / Robert Browning -- from "Faithful Wilson" / Thomas Hardy -- "The face in the mirror" / Robert Graves -- "I look into my glass" / Thomas Hardy -- "Growing old" / Matthew Arnold -- 2 Samuel 19:32-39 -- from "Girl from Samos" / Menander -- "O sovereign my Lord! oldness has come" / Ptah Hotep -- from The book of common prayer. "For when thou art angry all our days are gone" -- from The diary of Alice James / Alice James -- "He who has lived sixty years" / Egyptian papyrus -- Letter to W. Morton Fullerton / Henry James -- "My picture left in Scotland" / Ben Jonson -- from Paradise lost / John Milton -- "Song" / Christina Rossetti -- "Old age" / Buland al-Haydari -- "What, then, is life if love the golden is gone?" / Mimnermus -- Chorus, from Herakles / Euripides -- from Oedipus at Colonus / Sophocles -- "Jogger" / Daniel Hoffman -- Letter to Pierre Moreno / Colette -- "Last housecleaning" / Mark Van Doren -- from As we are now / May Sarton -- Ecclesiastes 1:1-18 -- "Lebensweisheitspielerei" / Wallace Stevens.
"One life" / Adrienne Rich -- "Dead before death" / Christina Rossetti -- "Old age" / Yusuf al-Khal -- "I want you to be harsh" / Tom O'Shea -- "I haven't lost my marbles yet!" / Minnie I. Hodapp -- "The old player" / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- from The adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Mark Twain -- "Losing the marbles" / James Merrill -- "No" / John Berryman -- "Résumé" / Dorothy Parker -- "Life Is fine" / Langston Hughes -- from The coming of age / Simone de Beauvoir -- from Enjoy old age / B.F. Skinner -- Letter to John Taylor / Samuel Johnson -- from On old age / Cicero -- "Provide, provide" / Robert Frost -- "I to my perils" / A.E. Housman -- "He never expected much" / Thomas Hardy -- from The view in winter / Ronald Blythe -- from Enjoy old age / B.F. Skinner -- "Resolutions when I come to be old" / Jonathan Swift -- from an interview / Robertson Davies -- from Commonplace book / E.M. Forster -- "Poets" ; "A poem about black power" / Kay Boyle -- "To his coy mistress" / Andrew Marvell -- from The faerie queene / Edmund Spenser -- from Ainsi soit-il / André Gide -- from Essays / Montaigne -- "Defiance of age (Ode 11) / Anacreon -- from Henry IV, Part I / William Shakespeare -- from The art of growing old / John Cowper Powys -- "Sailing to Byzantium" / W.B. Yeats -- from To the lighthouse / Virginia Woolf -- from The coming of age / Simone de Beauvoir -- "No coward soul is mine" ; "Riches I hold in light esteem" / Emily Brontë -- "The courage that my mother had" / Edna St. Vincent Millay -- "Let no charitable hope" ; "Nadir" / Elinor Wylie -- from a letter to Henry P. Bowditch / William James -- from Journal / Wu Yü-pi -- "Do not go gentle into that good night" / Dylan Thomas -- from his diary / Henry James -- "The decision" / Theodore Roethke -- "Advice to the old (including myself)" / Kay Boyle -- "This high summer we love will pour its light" / Adrienne Rich -- "Age and light" / Sappho -- from Hooked : film writing 1985-88 / Pauline Kael -- from Commonplace book / E.M. Forster -- from Letters to Lucilius / Seneca -- "Leaf after leaf drops off, flower after flower" ; "Death stands above me whispering low" ; "Dying speech of an old philosopher" / Walter Savage Landor -- from Commonplace book / E.M. Forster -- from The republic / Plato.
from "From 'Oedipus at Colonus'" ; from "The tower" / W.B. Yeats -- "The restored" / Theodore Roethke -- from Letters / Edith Wharton -- from an interview with Ronald Blythe / Crossing-keeper's Son (Anonymous) -- from The coming of age / Simone de Beauvoir -- "Yorkshire wife's saga" / Ruth Pitter -- "The envelope" / Maxine Kumin -- from The art of being a grandfather. "The contented exile" ; "Georges and Jeanne" / Victor Hugo -- "Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest" ; "Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend" ; "Then let not winter's ragged hand deface" ; "Lo, in the orient when the gracious light" ; "Against my love shall be, as I am now" / William Shakespeare -- Letter to Hugh Walpole / Henry James -- Letter to Malcolm Cowley / Kenneth Burke -- "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought" ; "Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts" ; "That time of year thou mayest in me behold" / William Shakespeare -- "Dover beach" / Matthew Arnold -- "John Anderson my jo" / Robert Burns -- "Wish for a young wife" / Theodore Roethke -- "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" / Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- "Life begins at 80" / Frank Laubach -- "The burden of an ancient rhyme" / Walter Savage Landor -- from Anatomy of an illness / Norman Cousins -- "David and Solomon" / James Ball Naylor -- Epigrams / John Betjeman, Richard Armour, Elder Olson -- Dinner speech / Mark Twain -- One-liners / Ninon de Lenclos, Goodman Ace, Joel Chandler Harris, Casey Stengel, Eubie Blake, James Thurber, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lawrence J. Peter, John Gay -- "Crossing the border" / Ogden Nash -- "There was an old man with a beard" ; "There was an old man who supposed" / Edward Lear -- "Advice from a caterpillar" / Lewis Carroll -- from Volpone / Ben Jonson -- from Watt / Samuel Beckett -- Letter to Malcolm Cowley / Kenneth Burke -- "Epigram XXVI" / Walter Savage Landor -- "Doggerel by a senior citizen" / W.H. Auden -- from Confucian analects / Confucius -- from Counsels and maxims / Arthur Schopenhauer -- from The coming of age / Simone de Beauvoir -- from Self-consciousness : a memoir / John Updike -- from String quartet #16 / Ludwig von Beethevon-- "now does our world descend" / e.e. cummings -- from The coming of age / Simone de Beauvoir -- "To age" / Walter Savage Landor -- Koved funeral prayer (adapted from Psalms 144 and 90) -- from Lives / Diogenes Laertius -- from King Lear / William Shakespeare -- from Autobiography / Bertrand Russell -- "To get the final lilt of songs" / Walt Whitman -- from Sister age / M.F.K. Fisher -- from "Crabbed age and youth" / Robert Louis Stevenson -- "A pastoral nun" / Wallace Stevens -- from "The canzioniere" / Petrarch -- "Among school children" / W.B. Yeats -- "The whole question" / Robert Penn Warren -- "God's grandeur" / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- "The flower / George Herbert -- "Up-hill" / Christina Rossetti.
"On his blindness" / John Milton -- "In winter in the woods alone" / Robert Frost -- from At seventy : a journal / May Sarton -- "The silence now" ; "Old lovers at the ballet" / May Sarton -- "The first snow of the year" / Mark Van Doren -- "Night thoughts in age" / John Hall Wheelock -- "Fern hill" / Dylan Thomas -- "Grasses" / Amy Clampitt -- "Fizzle 3 : afar a bird" / Samuel Beckett -- from "A catch of shy fish" / Gwendolyn Brooks -- "A prayer for old age" / W.B. Yeats -- "From my diary" / Stephen Spender -- "Wide awake, full of love" / William Carlos Williams -- "After the Persian" / Louise Bogan -- "The plain sense of things" / Wallace Stevens -- "Nadirs" ; "Brim" ; "Stroke" / Josephine Miles -- "Crossing the bar" / Alfred Lord Tennyson -- "Halcyon days" / Walt Whitman -- "Old women" / Czeslaw Milosz -- "Breakfast time" / Betty Rosen -- "Thinking of the lost world" / Randall Jarrell -- from Ecclesiastes -- Psalm 90 -- "Hymn to God my God, in my sickness" / John Donne -- "What are years" / Marianne Moore.
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