I'm sorry you are wiser,
I'm sorry you are taller;
I liked you better foolish
And I liked you better smaller.
- Aline Murray Kilmer

Although I'm trying very hard
To sound unlike a birthday card,
That's all this is: so you may find it
Full of all that lies behind it
Admiration; friendship too;
And hope that in the future you
Reap ever richer revenue.
- Philip Larkin

Stella this day is thirty-four
(We shan't dispute a year or more)—
However, Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy size and years are doubled,
Since first I saw thee at sixteen,
The brightest virgin on the green,
So little is thy form declined,
Made up so largely in thy mind.
Oh, would it please the gods, to split
Thy beauty, size, and years, and wit,
No age could furnish out a pair
Of nymphs so graceful, wise, and fair,
- Jonathan Swift

Monday's child is fair in face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for its living;
And a child that is born on a Christmas day,
Is fair and wise, good and gay.
- Anonymous

Birthdays? yes, in a general way;
For the most if not for the best of men:
You were born (I suppose) on a certain day:
So was I: or perhaps in the night: what then?
- James Kenneth Stephen

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
- Sir John Betjeman

I heard the bells, on Christmas Day,
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Midnight, and the clock strikes.
It is Christmas Day, the werewolves' birthday,
the door of the solstice still wide enough open
to let them all slink through.”
- Angela Carter

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
- Christina Georgina Rossetti

This Day, whate'er the Fates decree;
Shall still be kept with Joy by me:
This Day then, let us not be told,
That you are sick, and I grown old,
- CSwift

As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new,—and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.
- James Russell Lowell

How seasonably
leaf and blossom uncurl
and living things arrange their death,
while someone from afar off
blows birthday candles for the world.
- Irving Layton

For in the word death
There is nothing to grasp; nothing to catch or claim;
Nothing to adapt the skill of the heart to, skill
In surviving, for death it cannot survive,
Only resign the irrecoverable keys.
The wave falters and drowns. The coulter of joy
Breaks. The harrow of death
Depends. And there are thrown up waves.
- Philip Larkin

Death quarrels, and shakes the tree,
And fears are flowers, and flowers are generation,
And the founding, foundering, beast-instructed mansion
Of love called into being by this same death
Hangs everywhere its light.
- Philip Larkin

This is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
- Philip Larkin

Morning, a glass door, flashes
Gold names off the new city,
Whose white shelves and domes travel
The slow sky all day.
I land to stay here....
- Philip Larkin

As a war in years of peace
Or in war an armistice
Or a father's death, just so
Our parting was not visualized....
- Philip Larkin

Gull, grass and girl
In air, earth and bed
Join the long whirl
Of all the resurrected....
- Philip Larkin

All catches alight
At the spread of spring:
Birds crazed with flight
Branches that fling
Leaves up to the light
- Philip Larkin

Behind the glass, under the cellophane,
Remains your final summer sweet
And meaningless, and not to come again.
- Philip Larkin

All men hesitate
Separately, always, seeing another year gone
Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate,
Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields,
All silent, watching the winter coming on.
- Philip Larkin

Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air,
Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men
Through mists at morning.
- Philip Larkin

Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn,
Hundreds of bees in the purple clover,
Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn,
But only one mother the wide world over.
- George Cooper

The air deals blows: surely too hard, too often?
No: it is bent on bringing summer down.
Dead leaves desert in thousands, outwards, upwards,
Numerous as birds; but the birds fly away....
- Philip Larkin

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