from Over to Candleford, chapter XXVIII, Growing Pains (Flora Thompson)

Her mother, with five children to keep and care for, was hard-pressed, especially as she still insisted upon living up to her old standard of what she called 'seemliness'.  Her idea of good housekeeping was that every corner of the house should be clean, clean sheets should be on the beds, clean clothes on every one of the seven bodies for which she was responsible, a good dinner on the table and a cake in the pantry for tea by noon every Sunday.  She would sit up sewing till midnight and rise before daybreak to wash clothes.  But she had her reward.

God's Grandeur (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
  And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The Trees (Philip Larkin)

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

from Skellig, chapter twenty-five (David Almond)

The wires and the tubes were in her again.  The glass case was shut.  She didn't move.  She was wrapped in white.  Her hair was fluffy, dead straight and dark.  I wanted to touch it, and to touch her skin, feel it soft against my fingertips.  Her little hands were clenched tight on either side of her head.  We said nothing.  I listened to the drone of the city outside, to the clatter of the hospital.  I heard my own breathing, the scared quick breathing of my parents at my side.  I heard them sniffing back their tears.  I went on listening.  I listened through all these noises, until I heard the baby, the gentle squeaking of her breath, tiny and distant as if it came from a different world.  I closed my eyes and went on listening and listening.  I listened deeper, until I believed I heard her beating heart.  I told myself that if I listened hard enough her breathing and the beating of her heart would never be able to stop.