My heart is like a singing birdWhose nest is in a water’d shoot;My heart is like an apple-treeWhose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;My heart is like a rainbow shellThat paddles in a halcyon sea;My heart is gladder than all these,Because my love is come to me.
Birthdays
Short birthday poems for a card
Short poems to write inside a birthday card, each under 70 words. Christina Rossetti's A Birthday is pure happiness, Browning's Grow Old Along With Me suits a partner or a big round number, Shakespeare tells a friend they can never be old, and Herrick says gather ye rosebuds. For a child there is Stevenson's Happy Thought and Blake's Infant Joy, and for an older birthday Tennyson's lines from Ulysses and Landor's dignified Finis. All public domain and copied word for word from the original book.
How to use these
- In a small card, a four-line extract is fine: copy the first stanza and add the poet's name.
- Browning and Tennyson suit 40th, 50th and 60th birthdays; Stevenson and Blake suit children.
- Add a line of your own underneath; the poem sets the mood, your note makes it personal.
Grow old along with me!The best is yet to be,The last of life, for which the first was made:Our times are in His handWho saith, "A whole I planned,Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid!"
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,For as you were when first your eye I ey’d,Such seems your beauty still.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying:And this same flower that smiles to-dayTo-morrow will be dying.
My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety.
The world is so full of a number of things,I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
‘I have no name;I am but two days old.’What shall I call thee?‘I happy am,Joy is my name.’Sweet joy befall thee!Pretty joy!Sweet joy, but two days old.Sweet joy I call thee:Thou dost smile,I sing the while;Sweet joy befall thee!
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,Jumping from the chair she sat in;Time, you thief, who love to getSweets into your list, put that in!Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,Say I’m growing old, but add,Jenny kiss’d me.
Life has loveliness to sell,All beautiful and splendid things,Blue waves whitened on a cliff,Soaring fire that sways and sings,And children's faces looking upHolding wonder like a cup.
Spend all you have for loveliness,Buy it and never count the cost;For one white singing hour of peaceCount many a year of strife well lost,And for a breath of ecstasyGive all you have been, or could be.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in theeCalls back the lovely April of her prime;So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’We are not now that strength which in old daysMoved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;One equal temper of heroic hearts,Made weak by time and fate, but strong in willTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a Line,Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar KhayyámRubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1120 · Quatrain LI
Translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
Read the full text
Translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
Read the full text
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:I warm’d both hands before the fire of life;It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
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