Guest Poet(s):
Anna Akhmatova, Matsuo Basho, Djuna Barnes, William Blake, Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Witter Bynner, Willa Cather, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, Adelaide Crapsey, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, H.D., John Donne, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jessie Redmon Faust, Robert Frost, Tu Fu, Kahlil Gibran, Angelina Weld Grimke, Thomas Hardy, Frances Ellen Walkins Harper, Sadakichi Hartman, Robert Hayden, Earnest Hemingway, Robert Hillyer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, John Keats, Aline Murray Kilmer, Alfred Kreymborg, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, D.H. Lawrence, Emma Lazarus, Janet Loxley Lewis, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Mina Loy, Archibald MacLeish, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Effie Lee Newsome, Yone Noguchi, Li Po, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Lola Ridge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sappho, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Anne Spencer, Leonora Speyer, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marion Strobel, Rabindranath Tagore, Sara Teasdale, Jean Toomer, William Butler Yeats, Elinor Wylie, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams...
(The following poems are in the public domain.)
Solitude
by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
So many stones have been thrown at me,
That I'm not frightened of them anymore,
And the pit has become a solid tower,
Tall among tall towers.
I thank the builders,
May care and sadness pass them by.
From here I'll see the sunrise earlier,
Here the sun's last ray rejoices.
And into the windows of my room
The northern breezes often fly.
And from my hand a dove eats grains of wheat..,
As for my unfinished page,
The Muse's tawny hand, divinely calm
And delicate, will finish it.
For Osip Mandelstam
by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
And over St. Peter's there are poplars, crows.
There's a pale green dome there that glows,
dim in the sun-shrouded dust.
The field of heroes lingers in my thought,
Kulikovos barbarian battleground.
The frozen poplars, like glasses for a toast,
clash now, more noisily, overhead.
As though it was our wedding, and the crowd
were drinking to our health and happiness.
But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard
the room where the exiled poet is banished,
and the night, marching at full pace,
of the coming dawn, has no knowledge.
This Much and More
by Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)
If my lover were a comet
Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
In his hair.
Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
Beneath the loam,
My fingers would learn to dig
And I'd plunge home!
[The Cry of the Cicada]
by Matsuo Basho (1643-1694)
The cry of the cicada
Gives us no sign
That presently it will die.
--translation by William George Aston
Divine Image
by William Blake (1757-1827)
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
When Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
The Tiger
by William Blake (1757-1827)
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of they heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
To Winter
by William Blake (1757-1827)
O winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.
He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheathed
In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes;
For he hath rear'd his sceptor o'er the world.
Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings
To his strong bones, studies o'er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and in his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.
He takes his seat upon the cliffs, the mariner
Cries in vain. Poor little wretch! that deal'st
With storms; till heaven smiles, and the monster
Is driven yelling to his caves beneath Mount Hecla.
The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1671)
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling then is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But not save homespun cloth i' th' house I find.
In this array 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critics' hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
In for thy father asked, say thou had'st none;
And for thy mother, she also is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
Patience Taught by Nature
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861)
"O Dreary life!" we cry, "O dreary life!"
And still the generations of birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife
With Heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land: savannah-swords
Unweary sweep: hills watch, unworn; and rife
Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees,
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory. O thou God of old!
Grant me much patience, as a blade of grass
Grows by contented through the heat and cold.
A Sea-Side Walk
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861)
We walked beside the sea,
After a day which perished silently
Of its own glory, like the Princess weird
Who, combatting the Genius, scorched and seared,
Uttered with burning breath, "Ho! victory!"
And sank adown, on heap of ashes pale;
So runs the Arab tale.
The sky above us showed
An unusual and unmoving cloud,
On which, the cliffs permitted us to see
Only the outline of their majesty,
As master-minds, when gazed at by the crowd!
And, shining with a gloam, the water grey
Swang in its moon-taught way.
Nor moon nor stars were out,
They did not dare to tread so soon about,
Though trembling, in the footsteps of the sun.
The light was neither night's nor day's, but one
Which, life-like, had a beauty in its doubt;
And Silence's impassioned breathings round
Seemed wending into sound.
O solemn-beating heart
Of nature! I have knowledge that thou art
Bound unto man's by cords he cannot sever!
And, what time they are slackened by him ever,
So to attest his own supernal past,
Still runneth thy vibration fast and strong
The slackened cord along.
For though we never spoke
Of the grey water anal the shaded rock,
Dark wave and stone, unconsciously, were fused
Into the plaintive speaking that we used,
Of absent friends and memories unforsook;
And, had we seen each other's face, we had
Seen haply, each was sad.
At the Last
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
There is no denying
That it matters little,
When through a narrow door
We enter a room together,
Which goes after, which before.
Perhaps you are not dying:
Perhaps--there is no knowing--
I shall slip by and turn and laugh with you
Because it mattered so little,
The order of our going.
Undressing You
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
Fiercely I remove from you
All the little vestiges--
Garments that confine you,
Things that touch the flesh,
The wool and the silk
And the linen that entwine you,
Tear them all away from you,
Bare you from the mesh.
And now I have you as you are,
Nothing to encumber you--
But now I see, caressing you,
Colder hands than mine.
They take away your flesh and bone,
And, utterly undressing you,
They tear you from your beauty
And they leave no sign.
At the Touch of You
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
At the touch of you,
As if you were an archer with your swift hand at the bow,
The arrows of delight shot through my body.
You were spring,
And I the edge of a cliff,
And a shining waterfall rushed over me.
Train-Mates
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height,
A glory; but a negligible sight,
For you had often seen a mountain-peak
But not my paper. So we came to speak...
A smoke, a smile,-- a good way to commence
The comfortable exchange of difference!
You a young engineer, five feet eleven,
Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven,
Liking a road-bed newly built and clean,
Your fingers hot to cut away the green
Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track
The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,--
And I a poet, wistful of my betters,
Reading George Meredith's high-hearted letters,
Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech
Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each
Absorbing to himself--as I to me
And you to you--a glad identity!
After a time, when others went away,
A curious kinship made us choose to stay,
Which I could tell you now; but at the time
You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme,
Until we found that we were college men
And smoked more easily and smiled again;
And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still:
"I know your fine Greek theatre on the hill
At Berkeley!" With your happy Grecian head
upraised, "I never saw the place," you said--
"Once I was free of class, I always went
Out to the field."
Young engineer, you meant
As a fair tribute to the better part
As ever I did. Beauty of the heart
Is evident in temples. But it breathes
Alive where athletes quicken curly wreaths,
Which are the lovelier because they die.
You are a poet quite as much as I,
Though differences appear in what we do,
And I an athlete as much as you.
Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile
And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile.
Who knows but we shall look again and find
The circus-man and drummer, not behind
But leading in our visible estate--
As discus-thrower and as laureate?
Prairie Dawn
by Willa Cather (1873-1947)
A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
A breaking of the distant table-lands
Through purple mists ascending and the flare
Of water ditches silver in the light;
A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
A sudden sickness for the hills of home.
Garden Abstract
by Hart Crane (1889-1932)
The apple in its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is a prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree;
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
A Man Said to the Universe
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
In the Desert
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
The Impact of a Dollar Upon the Heart
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles wan red light
Sweeping from the heart rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool shadows
Moving swiftly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkys
And yawning emblems of Persia
Checked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
Silly rich peasants stamp the carpets of men,
Dead men who dreamed fragrance and light
Into their woof, their lives;
The rug of an honest bear
Under the feet of a cryptic slave
Who speaks always of baubles,
Forgetting state, multitude, work, and state,
Champing and mouthing of hats,
Making ratful squeak of hats,
Hats.
Untitled
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
Places among the stars,
Soft gardens near the sun,
Keep your distant beauty;
Shed no beams upon my weak heart.
Since she is here
In a place of blackness,
Not your golden days
Nor your silver nights
Can call me to you.
Since she is here
In a place of blackness,
Here I stay and wait.
The Guarded Wound
by Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)
If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!
Saying of Il Haboul
by Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)
My tent
A vapour that
The wind dispels and but
As dust before the wind am I
Myself.
Crepuscule
by E.E. Cummings
I will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burn-
in flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my
body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will I complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
I Died For Beauty, But Was Scarce
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are." he said.
I Had No Time To Hate, Because
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I had no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.
Nor had I time to love; but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers - (314)
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
"Hope" is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all--
And sweetest--in the Gale--is heard--
And sore must be the storm--
That could abash the little Bird--
That kept so many warm--
I've heard it in the chillest land--
And on the strangest Sea--
Yet--never--in Extremity,
It asked a crumb--of me.
I Felt A Funeral In My Brain
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum--
Kept beating--beating--till I thought
My Mind was going numb--
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space--began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here--
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down--
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished, knowing--then--
I Heard A Fly Buzz--When I Died--
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air--
Between the Heaves of Storm--
The Eves around--had wrung them dry--
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset--when the King
Be witnessed--in the Room--
I willed my Keepsakes--Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable--and then it was
There interposed a Fly--
With Blue--uncertain stumbling Buzz--
Between the light--and me--
And then the Windows failed--and then
I could not see to see--
Because I Could Not Stop For Death
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Because I could not stop for Death--
He kindly stopped for me--
The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
And Immortality.
We slowly drove--He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility--
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess--in the Ring--
We passed the fields of Grazing Grain--
We passed the Setting Sun--
Or rather--He passed Us--
The Dews grew quivering and chill--
For only Gossamer, my Gown--
My Tippet--only Tulle--
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground--
The Roof was scarcely visible--
The Cornice--in the Ground--
Since then--'tis Centuries--and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity--
To Make A Prairie It Takes A Clover and One Bee
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,--
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
Sea Iris
by H.D. (1886-1961)
I
Weed, moss-weed,
root tangled in sand,
sea-iris, brittle flower,
one petal like a shell
is broken,
and you print a shadow,
like a thin twig.
Fortunate one,
scented and stinging,
rigid myrrh-bud,
camphor-flower,
sweet and salt--you are wind
in our nostrils.
II
Do the murex-fishers
drench you as they pass?
Do your roots drag up colors
from the sand?
Have they slipped gold under you--
rivets of gold?
Band of iris-flowers
above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.
The Wind Sleepers
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Whiter
than the crust
left by the tide,
we are stung by the hurled sand
and the broken shells.
We no longer sleep
in the wind--
we awoke and fled
through the city gate.
Tear--
tear us an altar,
tug at the cliff-boulders,
pile them with the rough storms--
we no longer
sleep in the wind,
propitiate us.
Chant in a wind
that never halts,
pace a circle and pay tribute
with a song.
When the roar of a dropped wave
breaks into it,
pour meted words
of sea-hawks and full
sad sea-birds that cry
discords.
Orchard
by H.D. (1886-1961)
I saw the first pear
as it fell.
the honey-seeking, golden-bandeds,
the yellow swarm
was not more fleet than I,
(spare us from loveliness)
and I fell prostrate,
crying:
you have flayed us with your blossoms;
spare us the beauty
of fruit-trees.
The honey-seeking
paused not,
the air thundered their song,
and I alone was prostrate.
O rough-hewn
god of the orchard,
I bring you an offering--
do you, alone unbeautiful,
son of the god,
spare us from loveliness:
these fallen hazel-nuts,
stripped late of their green sheath,
the grapes, red-purple,
their berries
dripping with wine,
pomegranates already broken,
and shrunken figs,
and quinces untouched,
I bring you as offering.
Sea Poppies
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?
Oread
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Whirl up, sea--
Whirl your pointed pines
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us--
Cover us with your pools of fire.
Stars Wheel in Purple
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldebaran or Sirius,
not yet the stained and brilliant one of War;
stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiades are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous;
yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.
Sea Lily
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Reed,
slashed and torn
but doubly rich--
such great heads as yours
drift upon temple-steps,
but you are shattered
in the wind.
Myrtle-bark
is flecked from you,
scales are dashed
from your stem,
sand cuts your petal,
furrows it with hard edge,
like flint
on a bright stone.
Yet though the whole wind
slash as your bark,
you are lifted up,
aye--though it hiss
to cover you with froth.
Leda
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Where the slow river
meets the tide,
a red swan lifts red wings
and darker beak,
and underneath the purple down
on his soft breast
uncurls his coral feet.
Through the deep purple
of the dying heat
of sun and mist,
the level ray of sun-beam
has caressed
the lily with dark breast,
and flecked with richer gold
its golden crest.
Where the slow lifting
of the tide,
floats into the river
and slowly drifts
among the reeds,
and lifts the yellow flags,
he floats
where the tide and river meet.
Ah kingly kiss--
no more regret
nor old deep memories
to mar the lilies;
where the low sedge is thick,
the gold day-lily
outspreads and rests
beneath soft fluttering
of red swan wings
and the warm quivering
of the red swan's breast.
Sheltered Garden
by H.D. (1886-1961)
I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.
Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest--
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.
I have had enough--
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.
O for some sharp swish of a branch--
there is no-scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic astringent--
only border on border of scented pinks.
Have you seen fruit under cover
that wasted light--
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost;
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit--
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shriveled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.
Or the melon--
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste--
it is better to taste of frost--
the exquisite frost--
than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves--
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince--
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.
Batter my heart, three-personed God
(Holy Sonnet 14)
by John Donne(1572-1631)
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captivated, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But me betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Not ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Ships That Pass in the Night
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing
I look far out into the pregnant night,
Where I can hear a solemn booming gun
And catch the gleaming of a random light,
That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing.
My tearful eyes my soul's deep hurt are glassing,
For I would hail and check that ship of ships.
I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,
My voice fully dead a foot from mine own lips,
And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.
O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing
O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!
Is there no hope for me? Is there no way
That I may sight and check that speeding bark
Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?
Ode to Ethiopia
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory.
Sad days were those--ah, sad indeed!
But through the land the fruitful seed
Of better times was growing.
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spread its leaves so fresh and young--
Its blossoms now are blowing.
On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiopia's swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbor;
The forests flee before their stroke,
Their hammers ring, their forges smoke,--
They stir in honest labour.
They tread the fields where honor calls;
Their voices sound through senate halls
In majesty and power.
To right they cling; the hymns they sing
Up to the skies in beauty ring,
And bolder grow each hour.
Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire,
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.
Thou has the right to noble pride,
Whose spotless robes were purified
By blood's severe baptism,
Upon thy brow the cross was laid,
And labour's painful sweat-beads made
A consecrating chrism.
No other race, or white or black,
When bound as thou wert, to the rack,
So seldom stooped to grieving;
No other race, when free again,
Forget the past and proved them men
So noble in forgiving.
Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise,
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring,
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's glory.
Encouraged
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
Because you love me I have much achieved,
Had you despised me then I must have failed,
But since I knew you trusted and believed,
I could not disappoint you and so prevailed.
By the Stream
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
By the stream I dream in calm delight, and watch as in a glass,
How the clouds like crowds of snowy-hued and white-robed maidens pass,
And the water into ripples breaks and sparkles as it spreads,
Like a host of armored knights with silver helmets on their heads.
And I deem the stream an emblem fit of human life may go,
For I find a mind may sparkle much and yet but shallows show,
And a soul may glow with myriad lights and wondrous mysteries,
When it only lies a dormant thing and mirrors what it sees.
Character
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
The sun set, but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye;
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:
His action won such reverence sweet
As hid all measure of the feet.
Brahma
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt;
I am the hymn the Brahman sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
La Vie C'est La Vie
by Jessie Redmon Faust
(1882-1961)
On summer afternoons I sit
Quiescent by you in the park
And idly watch the sunbeams gild
And tint the ash-trees' bark.
Or else I watch the squirrels frisk
And chaffer in the grassy lane;
And all the while I mark your voice
Breaking with love and pain.
I know a woman who would give
Her chance of heaven to take my place;
To see the love-light in your eyes,
The love-glow on your face!
And there's a man whose lightest word
Can set my chilly blood afire;
Fulfillment of his least behest
Defines my life's desire.
But he will none of me, nor I
Of you. Nor you of her. 'Tis said
The world is full of jests like these--
I wish that I were dead.
Oriflamme
by Jessie Redmon Faust
(1882-1961)
"I can remember when I was a little, young, girl, how my old mammy would sit out
of doors in the evenings and groan, and I would say,
'Mammy, what makes you groan so?' And she would say, 'I am groaning to think
of my poor children; they do not know where I be and I don't know where they be.
I look up at the stars and they look up at the stars!'"
I think I see her sitting bowed and black,
Stricken and seared with slavery's mortal scars,
Reft of her children, lonely, anguished, yet
Still looking at the stars.
Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,
Pounding our stubborn hearts on Freedom's bars,
Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set,
Still visioning the stars!
Dead Fires
by Jessie Redmon Faust
(1882-1961)
If there is peace, this dead and leaden thing,
Then better far the hateful fret, the sting.
Better the wound forever seeking balm
Than this gray calm!
Is this pain's surcease? Better far the ache,
The long-drawn dreary day, the night's white wake,
Better the choking sigh, the sobbing breath,
Than passion's death!
The Sound of Trees
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door,
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on,
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The Exposed Nest
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But 'twas no make-believe with you to-day,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Still-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover,
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once--could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not want to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven't any memory--have you?--
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.
The River Village
by Tu Fu (712-770)
translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
The river makes a bend and encircles the village with its current.
All the long summer, the affairs and occupations of the river village are quiet
and simple.
The swallows who nest in the beams go and come as they please.
The gulls in the middle of the river enjoy one another, they crowd together and
touch one another.
My old wife paints a chess-board on paper.
My little sons hammer needles to make fish-hooks.
I have many illnesses, therefore my only necessities are medicines.
Besides these, what more can so humble a man as I ask?
On Joy and Sorrow
by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
Then a woman said, Speak to use of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes
filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can
contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in
the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was
hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it
is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see
that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay,
sorrow is greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come and when one sits alone with you at your board,
remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your
joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver,
needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
On Love
by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.
And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there
fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind
lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he
is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest
branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their
clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may
become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the
secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment
of Life's heart.
But if in your heart you would seek only love's peace and love's
pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and
pass out of love's threshing floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of
your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but
rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it
finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desire, let these be your
desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to
the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for
another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart
and a song of praise upon your lips.
El Beso
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
Twilight--and you
Quiet--the stars;
Snare of the shine of your teeth,
Your provocative laughter,
The gloom of your hair;
Lure of you, eye and lip;
Yearning, yearning,
Languor, surrender;
Your mouth,
And madness, madness,
Tremulous, breathless, flaming,
The space of a sigh;
Then awakening--remembrance,
Pain, regret--your sobbing;
And again, quiet--the stars,
Twilight--and you.
To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimke
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
Still are there wonders of the dark and day;
The muted shrillings of shy things at night,
So small beneath the stars and moon;
The peace, dream-frail, but perfect while the light
Lies softly on the leaves at noon.
These are, and these will be
Until Eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.
Each dawn, while yet the east is veiled gray,
The birds about her window wake and sing;
And far away each day some lark
I know is singing where the grasses swing;
Some robin calls and calls at dark.
These are, and these will be
Until Eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.
The wild flowers that she loved down green ways stray;
Her roses lift their wistful buds at dawn,
But not for eyes that loved them best;
Only her little pansies are all gone,
Some lying softly on her breast.
And flowers will bud and be
Until Eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.
Where has she gone? And who is there to say?
But this we know: her gentle spirit moves
And is where beauty never wanes,
Perchance by other streams, mid other groves;
And to us here, ah! she remains
A lovely memory,
Until Eternity;
She came, she loved, and then she went away.
To Joseph Lee
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
How strange, how passing strange, when we lie down
To sleep, to know that you are quite
Alone beneath the moon, the stars, the little leaves,
Within the night.
How strange, how passing strange to know--our eyes
Will gladden at the fine sweet sight
Of you no more, for now your face is hid
Within the night.
Strange, strange indeed, these things to us appear
And yet we know they must be right;
And though your body sleeps, your soul has passed
Beyond the night.
Ah! friend it must be sweet to slip from out
The tears, the pain, the losing fight
Below, and rest, just rest eternally
Beyond the night.
And sweet it must be too, to know the kiss
of peace, of Peace, the pure, the white
And step beside her hand in hand quite close
Beyond the night.
The Want of You
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
A hint of gold where the moon will be;
Through the flocking clouds just a star or two;
Leaf sounds, soft and wet and hushed,
And oh! the crying want of you.
The Puppet-Player
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
Sometimes it seems as though some puppet-player,
A clenched claw cupping a craggy chin
Sits just beyond the border of our seeing,
Twitching the strings with slow, sardonic grin.
He Abjures Love
by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
At last I put off love,
For twice ten years
The daysman of my thought,
And hope, and doing;
Being ashamed thereof,
And faint of fears
And desolations, wrought
in his pursuing,
Since first in youthtime those
Disquietings
That heart-enslavement brings
To hale and hoary,
Became my housefellows,
And, fool and blind,
I turned from kith and kind
To give him glory.
I was as children be
Who have no care;
I did not shrink or sigh,
I did not sicken;
But lo, Love beckoned me,
And I was base,
And poor, and starved, and fry,
And fever-stricken.
Too many times ablaze
With fatuous fires,
Enkindled by his wiles
To new embraces,
Did I, by wilful ways
And baseless ires,
Return the anxious smiles
Of friendly faces.
No more will now rate I
The common rare,
The midnight drizzle less,
The gray hour golden,
The wind a yearning cry,
The faulty fair,
Things dreamt, of comelier here
Than things beholden!. . .
I speak as one who plumbs
Life's dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.
But--after love what comes?
A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
And then, the curtain.
1883
A Kiss
by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
By a wall the stranger now calls his,
Was born of old a particular kiss,
Without forethought in its genesis;
Which in a trace took wing on the air.
And where that spot is nothing shows:
There ivy calmly grows,
And no one knows
What a birth was there!
That kiss is gone where none can tell--
Not even those who felt its spell:
It cannot have died; that know we well,
Somewhere it pursues its flight,
One of a long procession of sounds
Traveling aethereal rounds
Far from earth's bounds
In the infinite.
The Burdens of All
by Frances Ellen Walkins Harper
(1825-1911)
We may o'er the heavy burdens
Of the black, the brown and white;
But if we all clasped hands together
The burdens would be more light.
How to solve life's saddest problems,
Its weariness, want and woe,
Was answered by One who suffered
In Palestine long ago.
He gave from the heart this precept,
To east the burdens of men,
"As he would that others do to you
Do ye even so to them."
Life's heavy, wearisome burdens
Will change to a gracious trust
When men shall learn in the light of God
To be merciful and just.
Where war has sharpened his weapons
And slavery masterful hand,
Let white and black and brown unite
To build the kingdom of God.
And never attempt in madness
To build a kingdom or state,
Through greed or gold or lust of power,
On the crumbling stones of hate.
The burdens will always be heavy,
The sunshine fade into night,
Till mercy and justice shall cement
The black, the brown and the white.
And each shall answer with gladness,
The herald angel's refrain,
When "Peace on earth, good will to men"
Was the burden of their strain.
Why I Love Thee
by Sadakichi Hartman
(1867-1944)
Why I love thee?
Ask why the seawind wanders,
Why the shore is aflush with the tide,
Why the moon through heaven meanders
Like seafaring ships that ride
On a sullen, motionless deep;
Why the seabirds are fluttering the strand
Where the waves sing themselves to sleep
And starshine lives in the curves of the sand!
Those Winter Mornings
by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic anger of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Along With Youth
by Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow-eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boys' letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday's Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.
Montparnasse
by Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows.
No successful suicides.
A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the
dome)
A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.
(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)
They find a model dead
alone in bed and very dead.
(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)
Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.
Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the cafe.
Fog
by Robert Hillyer (1895-1961)
Where does the sea end and the sky begin?
We sink in blue for which there is no word.
Two sails, fog-colored, loiter on thin
Mirage of ocean.
There is no sound of wind, nor wave, nor bird,
Nor any motion.
Except the shifting mists that turn and lift,
Showing behind the two limp sails a third,
Then blotting it again.
A gust, a spattering of rain,
The lazy water breaks in nervous rings
Somewhere a bleak bell buoy sings,
Muffled at first, then clear,
Its wet, gray monotone.
The dead are here,
We are not quite alone.
Fragment
by Gerard Manly Hopkins
(1844-1889)
What being in rank-old nature should earlier have
that breath been
That here personal tells off these heart-song powerful
peals?--
A bush-browed, beetle-browed billow is it?
With a south-westerly wind blustering, with a tide
rolls reels
Of crumbling, fore-foundering, thundering all-surfy
seas in; seen
Underneath, their glassy-barrel, of a fairy green,
Of a jaunting vaunting vaulting assaulting
trumpet telling
The Windhover: To Christ our Lord
by Gerard Manly Hopkins
(1844-1889)
I caught this morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn
Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him stead air,
and striding
High there, how he run upon the rein of a
wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend
the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery
of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride
plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then,
a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my
chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough
down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Peace
by Gerard Manly Hopkins
(1844-1889)
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, sky wings
shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play
hypocrite
To my own heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace
allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does have Patience exquisite,
That plumes to peace thereafter. And when Peace here
does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
My People
by Langston Hughes
(1902-1967)
Dream-singers,
Story-tellers,
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate--
My People.
Dish-washers,
Elevator-boys,
Ladies' maids,
Crap-shooters,
Cooks,
Waiters,
Jazzers,
Nurses of babies,
Loaders of ships,
Porters,
Hairdressers,
Comedians in vaudeville
And band-men in circuses--
Dream-singers all,
Story-tellers all.
Dancers--
God! What dancers!
Singers--
God! What singers!
Singers and dancers,
Dancers and laughers.
Laughers?
Yes, laughers....laughers....laughers--
Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands of Fate.
Before a Painting
by James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
I knew not who had wrought with skill so fine
What I beheld; nor by what laws of art
He had created life and love and heart
On canvas, from mere color, curve and line.
Silent I stood and made no move or sign;
Not with the crowd, but reverently apart;
Nor felt the power my rooted limbs to start,
But mutedly gazed upon that face divine.
And over me the sense of beauty fell,
As music over a raptured listener to
The deep-voiced organ breathing out a hymn;
Or as on one who kneels, his beads to tell,
There falls the aureate glory filtered through
The windows in some old cathedral dim.
Deep in the Quiet Wood
by James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
Are you bowed down in heart?
Do you but hear the clashing discords and the din of life?
Then come away, come to the peaceful wood,
Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,
From out the palpitating solitude
Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains?
They are above, around, within you, everywhere.
Silently, listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.
They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.
Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale
Until, responsive to the tonic chord,
It touches the diapason of God's grand cathedral organ,
Filling earth for you with heavenly peace
And holy harmonies.
Down By the Carib Sea (VI: Sunset in the Tropics)
by James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
A silver flash from the sinking sun,
Then a shot of crimson across the sky
That, bursting, lets a thousand colors fly
And riot among the clouds; they run,
Deepening the purple, flaming in gold,
Changing, and opening fold after fold,
Then fading through all the tints of the rose into gray.
Till, taking quick fright at the coming night,
They rush down the west,
In hurried quest
Of the fleeing day.
Now above where the tardiest color flares a moment yet,
One point of light, now two, now three are set
To form the starry stairs,--
And, in her firefly crown,
Queen Night, on velvet slippered feet, comes softly down.
Sonnet I: To My Brother George
by John Keats (1795-1821)
Many the wonders I this day have seen:
The sun, when first he kissed away the tears
That filled the eyes of Morn; the laureled peers
Who from the feathery gold of evening lean;
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been,
E'en now, dear George, while this for you I write,
Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping
So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,
And she her half-discovered revels keeping
But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonder of the sky and sea?
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
by John Keats (1795-1821)
My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main--
A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
by John Keats (1795-1821)
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who can'st thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels?
What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit deities of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou can'st not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never never can'st thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever big the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy, love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dress?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought;
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Shards
by Aline Murray Kilmer
(1888-1941)
I can never remake the thing I have destroyed;
I brushed the golden dust from the moth's wing,
I called down wind to shatter the cherry-blossoms,
I did a terrible thing.
I feared the cup might fall, so I flung it from me;
I feared that the bird might fly, so I set it free;
I feared that the dam might break, so I loosed the river:
May its waters cover me.
Poetry
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
Ladislaw the critic
is five feet six inches high,
which means
that his eyes
are five feet two inches
from the ground,
which means,
if you read him your poem,
and his eyes lift to five feet
and a trifle more than two inches,
what you have done
is Poetry--
should his eyes remain
at five feet two inches,
you have perpetrated prose,
and do his eyes stoop
--which Heaven forbid!--
the least trifle below
five feet two inches,
you
are an unspeakable adjective.
Cezanne
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
Our door was shut to the noon-day heat.
We could not see him.
We might not have heard him either--
Resting, dozing, dreaming pleasantly.
But his step was tremendous--
Are mountains on the march?
He was no man who passed;
But a great faithful horse
Dragging a load
Up the hill.
Vista
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
The snow,
ah yes, ah yes indeed,
is white and beautiful, white and beautiful,
verily beautiful--
from my window.
The sea, ah yes, ah yes, indeed,
is green and alluring, green and alluring,
verily alluring--
from the shore.
Love, ah yes, ah yes, ah yes indeed,
verily yes, ah yes indeed!
Old Manuscript
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
The sky
is that beautiful old parchment
in which the sun and the moon
keep their diary.
To read it all,
one must be a linguist
more learned than Father Wisdom,
and a visionary
more clairvoyant than mother Dream.
But to feel it,
one must be an apostle:
one who is more than intimate
in having been, always,
the only confidant--
like the earth
or the sea.
Grasses
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
Who
would decry
instruments--
when grasses
ever so fragile,
provide strings
stout enough for
insect moods
to glide up and down
in glissandos
of toes along wires
or finger-tips on zithers--
though
the mere sounds
be theirs, not ours--
theirs, not ours,
the first inspiration--
discord
without resolution--
who
would cry
being loved,
when even such tinkling
comes of the loving?
Dance
by Alfred Kreymborg
(1883-1966)
Moon dance,
you were not to blame.
Nor you,
lovely white moth.
But I saw you together.
Peace
by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
(1851-1926)
An angel spoke with me, and lo, he hoarded
My falling tears to cheer a flower's face!
For, so it seems, in all the heavenly space
A wasted grief was never yet recorded.
Victorious calm those holy tones afforded
Unto my soul, whose outcry, in disgrace,
Changed to low music, leading to the place
Where, though well armed, with futile end awarded,
My past lay dead, "Wars are of earth!" he cried,
"Endurance only breathes immortal air.
Courage eternal, by a world defied,
Still wears the front of patience, smooth and fair."
Scent of Irises
by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
A faint, sickening scent of irises
Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table
A fine proud spike of purple irises
Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable
To see the class's lifted and bended faces
Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and
sable.
I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless
Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast
you
With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your chin
as you dipped
Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast
you,
Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-
smocks,
Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not outlast.
You amid the bog-end's yellow incantation,
You sitting in the clowslips of the meadow above,
Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-
blobs,
Me full length in the cowslips, muttering your love;
You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent,
You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a dove.
You are always asking, do I remember, remember
The butter-cup bog-end where the flowers rose up
And kindled your own days with a cast of gold?
You ask again, do the healing days close up
The open darkness which then drew us in,
The dark which then drank up our brimming cup.
You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of
night
Burnt like a sacrifice; you invisible,
Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you!
--And, yes, thank God, it is still possible
The healing days shall close the darkness up
Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew.
Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God,
The fire of night is gone, and your face is ash
Indistinguishable on the grey, chill day;
The night has burnt us out, at last the good
Dark fire burns on untroubled, without clash
Of you upon the dead leaves saying me Yea.
Coldness in Love
by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
And you remember, in the afternoon
The sea and the sky went grey, as if there had sunk
A flocculent dust on the floor of the world: the festoon
Of the sky sagged dusty as spider cloth,
And coldness clogged the sea, till it ceased to croon.
A dank, sickening scent came up from the grime
Of weed that blackened the shore, so that I recoiled
Feeling the raw cold dun me: and all the time
You leapt about on the slipping rocks, and threw
Me words that rang with a brassy, shallow chime.
And all day long, that raw and ancient cold
Deadened me through, till the grey downs dulled to
sleep.
Then I longed for you with your mantle of love to fold
Me over, and drive from out of my body the deep
Cold that had sunk to my soul, and there kept hold.
But still to me all evening long you were cold,
And I was numb with a bitter, deathly ache;
Till old days drew me back into their fold,
And dim hopes crowded me warm with
companionship,
And memories clustered me close, and sleep was
cajoled.
And I slept till dawn at the window blew in like dust,
Like a linty, raw-cold dust disturbed from the floor
Of the unswept sea; a grey pale light like must
That settled upon my face and hands till it seemed
To flourish there, as pale mould blooms on a crust.
And I rose in fear, needing you fearfully,
For I thought you were warm as a sudden jet of blood.
I thought I could plunge in your living hotness, and be
Clean of the cold and the must. With my hand on the
latch
I heard you in your sleep speak strangely to me.
And I dared not enter, feeling suddenly dismayed,
So I went and washed my deadened flesh in the sea
And came back tingling clean, but worn and frayed
With cold, like the shell of the moon; and strange it
seems
That my love can dawn in warmth again, unafraid.
A Baby Running Barefoot
by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass
The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind,
They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water;
And the sight of their white play among the grass
Is like a little robin's song, winsome,
Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one flower
For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings.
I long for the baby to wander hither to me
Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water,
So that she can stand on my knee
With her little bare feet in my hands,
Cool like syringa buds,
Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers.
Pentecostal
by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Shall I tell you, then, how it is?
There came a cloven gleam,
Like a tongue of darkened flame,
To burn in me.
And so I seem
To have you still the same
In one world with me.
In the flicker of a flower,
In a worm that is blind, yet strives,
In the mouse that pauses to listen,
Glimmers our
Shadow as well, and deprives
Them none their glisten.
In each shaken morsel
Our shadow trembles
As if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.
We are part in parcel
In shadow, nothing dissembles
Our darkened universe. You understand?
For I have told you plainly how it is.
The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus
(1849-1887)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Austerity
by Janet Loxley Lewis
(1899-1998)
From "Cold Hills"
I have lived so long
On the cold hills alone . . .
I loved the rock
And the lean pine trees,
Hated the life in the turfy meadow,
Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.
I have lived so long
Under the high monotony of starry skies,
I am so cased about
With the clean wind and the cold nights,
People will not let me in
To their warm gardens
Full of bees.
Granadella
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
I cut myself on the thought of you,
And yet I come back to it again and again,
A kind of fury makes me want to draw you out
From the dimness of the present
And set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.
Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,
I touch the blade of you and cling upon it,
And only when the blood runs out across my fingers
Am I at all satisfied.
Vintage
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
I will mix me a drink of stars,--
Large stars with polychrome needles,
Small stars jetting maroon and crimson,
Cool, quiet, green stars.
I will tear them out of the sky,
And squeeze them over an old silver cup,
And I will pour the cold scorn of my Beloved into it,
So that my drink shall be bubbled with ice.
It will lap and scratch
As I swallow it down;
And I shall feel it as a serpent of fire,
Coiling and twisting in my belly.
His snortings will rise to my head,
And I shall be hot, and laugh,
Forgetting that I have ever known a woman.
A Decade
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
The Captured Goddess
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Over the housetops,
Above the rotating chimney-pots,
I have seen a shiver of amethyst,
And blue and cinnamon have flickered
A moment,
At the far end of a dusty street.
Through sheeted rain
Has come a lustre of crimson,
And I have watched moonbeams
Hushed by a film of palest green.
It was her wings,
Goddess!
Who stepped over the clouds,
And laid her rainbow-feathers
Aslant on the currents of air.
I followed her for long,
With gazing eyes and stumbling feet.
I cared not where she led me,
My eyes were full of colors:
Saffrons, rubies, the yellows of beryls,
And the indigo blue of quarts;
Flights of rose, layers of chrysoprase,
Points of orange, spirals of vermilion,
The spotted gold of tiger-lily petals,
The loud pink of bursting hydrangeas.
I followed
And watched for the flashing of her wings.
In the city I found her,
The narrow-streeted city.
In the market-place I came upon her,
Bound and trembling.
Her fluted wings were fastened to her sides with cords,
She was naked and cold,
For that day the wind blew
Without sunshine.
Men chaffered for her
They bargained in silver and gold,
In copper, in wheat,
And called their bids across the market-place.
The Goddess wept.
Hiding my face I fled,
And the green wind hissed behind me,
Along the narrow streets.
Autumn
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia,
Opulent, flaunting.
Round gold
Flung out of a pale green stalk.
Round, ripe gold
Of maturity,
Meticulously frilled and flaming,
A fire-ball of proclamation:
Fecundity decked in staring yellow
For all the world to see.
They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,
To me who am barren
Shall I send it to you,
You who have taken with you
All I once possessed?
Lacquer Prints
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
One night
When there was a clear moon,
I sat down
To write a poem
About maple trees.
But the dazzle of moonlight
In the ink
Blinded me,
And I could only write
What I remembered.
Therefore, on the wrapping of my poem
I have inscribed your name.
Grotesque
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Why do the lilies goggle their tongues at me
When I pluck them;
And writhe, and twist,
And strangle themselves against my fingers,
So that I can hardly weave the garland
For your hair?
Why do they shriek your name
And spit at me
When I would cluster them?
Must I kill them
To make them lie still,
And send you a wreath of lolling corpses
To turn putrid and soft
On your forehead
While you dance?
Epilogue
by Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Love Songs (Section III)
by Mina Loy (1882-1966)
We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips.
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings.
Songs to Joannes, V
by Mina Loy (1882-1966)
Midnight empties the street
Of all but us
Three
I am undecided which way back
To the left a boy
--One wing has been washed in the rain
The other will never be clean any more--
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are smug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
--The poor can't wash in hot water--
And I don't know which turning to take
Since you got home to yourself--first
Soul-Sight
by Archibald MacLeish
(1892-1982)
Like moon-dark, like brown water your escape,
O laughing mouth, O sweet uplifted lips.
Within the peering brain old ghosts take shape;
You flame and wither as the white foam slips
Back from the broken wave: sometimes a start,
A gesture of the hands, a way you own
Of bending that smooth head above your heart,--
Then these are vanished, then the dream is gone.
Oh, you are too much mine and flesh of me
To seal upon the brain, who in the blood
Are so intense a pulse, so swift a flood
Of beauty, such unceasing instancy.
Dear unimagined brow, unvisioned face,
All beauty has become your dwelling place.
I Know My Soul
by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
I plucked my soul out of its secret place,
And held it to the mirror of my eye,
To see it like a star against the sky,
A twitching body quivering in space,
A spark of passion shining on my face.
And I explored it to determine why
This awful key to my infinity
Conspires to rob me of sweet joy and grace.
And if the sign may not be fully read,
If I can comprehend but not control,
I need not gloom my days with futile dread,
Because I see a part and not the whole.
Contemplating the strange, I'm comforted
By this narcotic thought: I know my soul.
Heritage
by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.
And suddenly some secret spring's released,
And unawares a riddle is revealed,
And I can read like large, black-lettered print,
What seemed before a thing forever sealed.
I know the magic word, the graceful thought,
The song that fills me in my lucid hours,
The spirit's wine that thrills my body through,
And makes me music-drunk, are yours, all yours.
I cannot praise, for you have passed from praise,
I have no tinted thoughts to paint you true;
But I can feel and I can write the word;
The best of me is but the least of you.
To O.E.A.
by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
Your voice is the color of a robin's breast,
And there's a sweet sob in it like rain--still rain in the night.
Among the leaves of the trumpet-tree, close to his nest,
The pea-dove sings, and each note thrills me with strange delight
Like the words, wet with music, that well from your trembling throat.
I'm afraid of your eyes, they're so bold,
Searching me through, reading my thoughts, shining with gold.
But sometimes they are gentle and soft like the dew on the lips of the eucharis
Before the sun comes warm with his lover's kiss,
You are sea-foam, pure with the star's loveliness,
Not mortal, a flower, a fairy, too fair for the beauty-born earth,
All wonderful things, all beautiful things, gave of their wealth to your birth--
O I love you so much, not recking of passion, that I feel it is wrong,
But men will love you, flower, fairy, non-mortal spirit burdened with flesh,
Forever, life-long.
Sonnet I
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,--no,
Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies,--I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist,--with moonlight so.
Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink--and live--what has destroyed some men.
First Fig
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!
I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear (Sonnet IV)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protect you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,--
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily,
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing.
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Ebb
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
The Fish
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices--
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink--
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice--
all the physical features of
ac-
cident--lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
Poetry
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the geniune.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us--that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance
of their opinion--
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Feed Me. Also, River God
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
Lest by diminished vitality and abated
vigilance, I become food for crocodiles--for that quicksand
of gluttony which is legion. It is then close at hand--
on either side
of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride
and stoutness of heart: "The bricks are fallen down, we will
build with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down, we will
change to cedars?" I am not ambitious to dress stones, to
renew forts, nor to match
my value in action, against their ability to catch
up with arrested prosperity. I am not like
them, indefatigable, but if you are a god, you will
not discriminate against me: Yet--if you may fulfill
none but prayer dressed
as gifts in return for your gifts--disregard the request.
Silence
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat--
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from
its mouth--
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my
house your inn."
Inns are not residences.
A Jelly-Fish
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent--
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it--
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.
To the Negro Farmer of the United States
by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
(1875-1935)
God washes clean the souls and hearts of you,
His favored ones, whose backs bend o'er the soil,
Which grudging gives to them requite for toil
In sober graces and in vision true.
God places in your hands the pow'r to do
A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil
The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil
Of Life's activities. Yet all too few
Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature's heart;
The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast
Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart
Of war within your hands, but pow'r to start
Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest
To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.
The Bronze Legacy
by Effie Lee Newsome
(1885-1978)
To a Brown Boy
'Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown,
Like the strongest things that make up this earth,
Like the mountains grave and grand,
Even like the very land,
Even like the trunks of trees--
Even oaks to be like these!
God builds His strength in bronze.
To be brown like thrush and lark!
Like the subtle wren so dark!
Nay, the king of beasts wears brown;
Eagles are of this same hue.
I thank God, then, I am brown.
Brown has mighty things to do.
Peacock Feather
by Effie Lee Newsome
(1885-1978)
Heav'n's deepest blue,
Earth's richest green,
Minted dust of stars,
Molten sunset sheen,
are blent together
On this lithe brown feather,
In a disk of light--
Lithe, light!
The Poet
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Comes like the stir of the day:
One whose breath is an odour,
Whose eyes show the road to stars,
The breeze in his face,
The glory of Heaven on his back.
He steps like a vision hung in air,
Diffusing the passion of Eternity;
His abode is the sunlight of morn,
The music of eve his speech:
In his sight,
One shall turn from the dust of the grave,
And move upward to the woodland.
Upon the Heights
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
And victor of life and silence,
I stood upon the Heights; triumphant,
With upturned eyes, I stood,
And smiled unto the sun, and sang
A beautifully sad farewell unto the dying day.
And my thoughts and the eve gathered
Their serpentine mysteries around me,
My thoughts like alien breezes,
The eve like a fragrant legend.
My feeling was that I stood as one
Serenely poised for flight, as a muse
Of golden melody and lofty grace.
Yes I stood as one scorning the swords
And wanton menace of the cities.
The sun had heavily sunk into the seas beyond,
And left me a tempting sweet and twilight.
The eve with trailing shadows westward
Swept on, and the lengthened shadows of trees
Disappeared: how silently the songs of silence
Steal into my soul! And still I stood
Among the crickets, in the beauteous profundity
Sung by stars; and I saw me
Softly melted into the eve. The moon
Slowly rose: my shadow on the ground
Dreamily began a dreamy roam,
And I upward smiled silent welcome.
Where Is The Poet
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
The inky-garmented, truth-dead Cloud--woven by dumb ghost alone in
the darkness of phantasmal mountain-mouth--kidnapped the
maiden Moon, silence-faced, love-mannered, mirroring her golden
breast on silvery rivulets:
The Wind, her lover, grey-haired in one moment, crazes around the
Universe, hunting her dewy love-letters, strewn secretly upon the
oat-carpets of the open field.
O, drama! never performed, never gossiped, never rhymed! Behold--to
the blind beast, ever tearless, iron-hearted, the Heaven has no
mouth to interpret these tidings!
Ah, where is the man who lives out of himself? the poet inspired often
to chronicle these tidings?
I Am Like A Leaf
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
The silence is broken: into the nature
My soul sails out,
Carrying the song of life on his brow,
To meet the flowers and birds.
When my heart returns in the solitude,
She is very sad,
Looking back on the dead passions
Lying on Love's ruin.
I am like a leaf
Hanging over hope and despair,
Which trembles and joins
The world's imagination and ghost.
[The faint shadow of the morning moon?]
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
The faint shadow of the morning moon?
Nay, the snow falling on the earth.
The mist of blooming flowers?
Nay, poetry smiling up at the sky.
In the Mountains on a Summer Day
by Li Po
Tang Dynasty (701-762)
Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.
--Translated by Arthur Waley 1919
Looking at the Moon after Rain
by Li Po
Tang Dynasty (701-762)
The heavy clouds are broken and blowing,
And once more I can see the wide common stretching beyond the four sides of
the city.
Open the door. Half of the moon-toad is already up,
The glimmer of it is like smooth hoar-frost spreading over ten thousand li.
The river is a flat, shining chain.
The moon, rising, is a white eye to the hills;
After it has risen, it is the bright heart of the sea.
Because I love it--so--round as a fan,
I hum songs until the dawn.
--Translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
To the River
by Edgar Allen Poe
(1809-1849)
Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow
Of crystal, wandering water,
Thou art an emblem of the glow
Of beauty, the unhidden heart,
The playful moziness of art
In old Alberto's daughter;
But when within thy wave she looks,
Which glistens then, and trembles,
Why, then the prettiest of brooks
Her worshiper resembles;
For in his heart, as in thy stream,
Her image deeply lies,
His heart which trembles at the beam
Of her soul-searching eyes.
A Dream within a Dream
by Edgar Allen Poe
(1809-1849)
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
This much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
"One" from the pitiless wave?
Is "all" that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Epitaph X on Mr. Elijah Fenton, at Easthamstead, in Berks, 1730
by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
This modest stone, what few vain marbles can,
May truly say, Here lies an honest man:
A poet, blest beyond the poet's fate,
Whom Heaven kept sacred from the proud and great:
Foe to loud praise, and friend to learned ease,
Content with science in the vale of peace.
Calmly he look'd on either life, and here
Saw nothing to regret, or there to fear;
From Nature's temperate feast rose satisfied,
Thank'd Heaven that he had lived, and the he had died.
Francesca
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
You came out of the night
And there were flowers in your hands,
Now you will come out of a confusion of people,
Out of a turmoil of speech about you.
I who have seen you amid the primal things
Was angry when they spoke your name
In ordinary places.
I would that the cool waves might
Flow over my mind,
And that the world should be
Dry as a dead leaf,
Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away,
So that I might find you again,
Alone.
Coda
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
O my songs
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into
people's faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?
The Sea of Glass
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of fires
with gold glories behind them.
Come My Cantilations
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Come my cantilations,
Let us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done
with them,
Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind,
Let me be free of pavements,
Let me be free of the printers.
Let come beautiful people
Wearing raw silk of good colour,
Let come the graceful speakers,
Let come the ready of wit,
Let come the gay of manner; the insolent and the
exulting,
We speak of burnished lakes,
And of dry air, as clean as metal.
The Coming of War: Actaeon
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
An image of Lethe,
and the fields
Full of faint light
but golden,
Gray cliffs,
and beneath them
A sea
Harsher than granite,
unstill, never ceasing;
High forms
with movement of gods,
Perilous aspect;
And one said:
"This is Actaeon."
Actaeon of golden greaves!
Over fair meadow,
Over the cool face of that field,
Unstill, ere moving,
Host of an ancient people,
The silent cortege.
The Sea of Glass
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of faces
with gold glories behind them.
Secrets
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
Secrets
infesting my half-sleep...
did you enter my wound from another wound
brushing mine in a crowd...
or did I snare you on my sharper edges
as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up
carries off spiders on its wings?
Secrets,
running over my soul without sound,
only when dawn comes tip-toeing
ushered by a suave wind,
and dreams disintegrate
like breath shapes in frosty air,
I shall overhear you, bare-foot,
scatting off into the darkness...
I shall know you, secrets,
by the litter you have left
and by your bloody foot-prints.
North Wind
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
I love you, malcontent
Male wind--
Shaking the pollen from a flower
Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.
Blow on and over my dreams...
Scatter my sick dreams...
Throw your lusty arms about me...
Envelop all my hot body...
Carry me to pine forests--
Great, rough-bearded forests..
Bring me to stark plains and steppes...
I would have the North tonight--
The cold, enduring North.
And if we should meet the Snow,
Whirling in spirals,
And he should blind my eyes...
Ally, you will defend me--
You will hold me close,
Blowing on my eyelids.
Potpourri
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
Do you remember
Honey-melon moon
Dripping thick sweet light
Where Canal Street saunters off by herself among quiet trees?
And the faint decayed patchouli--
Fragrance of New Orleans
Like a dead tube rose
Upheld in the warm air...
Miraculously whole.
Debris
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,
Or shudder and hood up their souls--
Those ruined ones,
Where Liberty has lodge an hour
And passed like flame,
Bursting asunder the too small house.
Interim
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
The earth is motionless
And poised in space...
A great bird resting in its flight
Between the alleys of the stars.
It is the wind's hour off....
The wind has nestled down among the corn....
The two speak privately together,
Awaiting the whirr of wings.
Altitude
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one clearly,
as with a new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.
Presaging
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(1873-1926)
I am like a flag unfurled in space,
I scent the oncoming winds and must bend with them,
While the things beneath are not yet stirring,
While doors close gently and there's silence in the chimneys
And the windows do not yet tremble and the dust is still heavy--
Then I feel the storm and am vibrant like the sea
And expand and withdraw into myself
And thrust myself forth am alone in the great storm.
What Will You Do God?
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)
Translated by B. Deutsch and A. Yarmolinsky
What will you do, God, when I die?
I am your jar (if cracked, I lie?)
Your well-spring (if this will go dry?)
I am your craft, your vesture I--
You lose your purport, losing me.
When I go, your cold house will be
Empty of words that made it sweet.
I am the sandals your bare feet
Will seek and long for, wearily.
Your cloak will fall from aching bones.
Your glance, that my warm cheeks have cheered
As with a cushion long endeared,
Will wonder at a loss so weird;
And, when the sun has disappeared,
Lie in the lap of alien stones.
What will you do, God? I am feared.
XII
by Sappho (615BC-550BC)
In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born,
And said to her,
"Mother of beauty, mother of joy,
Why hast thou given to men
"This thing called love, like the ache of a wound
In beauty's side,
To burn and throb and be quelled for an hour
and never wholly depart?"
And the daughter of Cyprus said to me,
"Child of the earth,
Behold, all things are born and attain,
But only as they desire,--
"The sun that is strong, the gods that are wise,
The loving heart,
Deeds and knowledge and beauty and joy,--
But before all else was desire."
Sonnet XVIII
by William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often in his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The Sonnets XXXVIII
by William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
How can my muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O! give thy self the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy personal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thy self dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymes invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
(Sonnet 65)
by William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o'er sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822)
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;
Whereupon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
'Tis the melodious here of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As [ ] grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles on each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hues
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a broken glare
Kindled by that inextricable error;
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there--
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.
Translation
by Anne Spencer (1882-1975)
He trekked into a far country,
My friend and I.
Our deeper content was never spoken,
But each knew all the other said.
He told me how calm his soul was laid
By the love of anvil and strife.
"The wooing kestrel," I said, "mutes his
mating-note
To please the harmony of this sweet silence."
And when at the day's end
We laid tired bodies 'gainst
The loose warm sands,
And the air fleeced its particles for a coverlet;
When star after star came out
To guard these lovers in oblivion--
My soul so leapt that my evening prayer
Stole my morning song!
Lines to a Nasturtium
by Anne Spencer (1882-1975)
"A lover muses"
Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,
I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?
A bird, next, small and humming,
Looked into your startled depths and fled. . .
Surely, some dread sight, and dafter
Than human eyes as mine can see,
Set the stricken air waves drumming
In his flight.
Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see, I cannot hear your fluty
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are in beauty
Born in vain;
Hair like the setting sun,
Her eyes a rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar
All your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet. . .
Ah, how the senses flood at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies
Beating, beating.
At the Carnival
by Anne Spencer (1882-1975)
Gay little Girl-of-the-Diving-Tank,
I desire a name for you.
Nice, as a right glove fits;
For you--who amid the malodorous
Mechanics of this unlovely thing,
Are darling of spirit and form.
I know you--a glance, and what you are
Sits-by-the-fire in my heart.
My Limousine-Lady knows you, or
Why does the slant-envy of her eye mark
Your straight air and radiant inclusive smile?
Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.
The bull-necked man knows you--this first time
His itching flesh sees form divine and vibrant health
And thinks not of his avocation.
I came curiously--
Set on no diversion, save that thy mind
Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds
In the presence of a blind crowd.
The color of life was gray.
Everywhere the setting seemed right
For my mood.
Here the sausage and garlic booth
Sent unholy incense skyward;
There a quivering female-thing
Gestured assignations, and lied
To call it dancing;
There, too, were games of chance
With chances for none;
But oh! Girl-of-the-Tank, at last!
Gleaming Girl, how intimately pure and free
The gaze you send the crowd,
As though you know the dearth of beauty
In its sordid life.
We need you--my Limousine-Lady,
The bull-necked man and I.
Seeing you here brave and water-clean,
Leaven for the heavy ones of earth,
I am swift to feel that what makes
The plodder glad is good; and
Whatever is good is God.
The wonder is that you are here;
I have seen the queer in queer places,
But never before a heaven-fed
Naiad of the Carnival-Tank!
Little Diver, Destiny for you,
Like as for me, is shod in silence;
Years may seep into your soul
The bacilli of the usual and the expedient;
I implore Neptune to claim his child to-day!
The Locust
by Leonora Speyer (1872-1956)
Its hot voice sizzles from some cool tree
Near-by:
It seems to burn its way through the air
Like a small, pointed flame of sound
Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.
Tender Buttons [A Light in the Moon]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sen- /sible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many / declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice / and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat / and a vacation and even more noise than cutting,
notwithstanding / Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding / an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cul- / tivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the / ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, / not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special reso- / lution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the / rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care / with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with / which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a mag- / nificent asparagus, and also a fountain.
Tender Buttons [Asparagus]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet / wet weather wet weather wet.
Tender Buttons [A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a / single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All / this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The differ- / ence is spreading.
Tender Buttons [Nothing Elegant]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is / a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and these places change then / certainly something is upright. It is earnest.
Tender Buttons [A Red Stamp]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even / dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if / they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they / do this they need a catalogue.
Tender Buttons [Eggs]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a little sudden mill. // Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady. // In white in white handerkerchiefs / with little dots in a white belt all / shadows are singular and procured and relieved. // Not that is not the cows shame and a precocious sound, it is a bite. // Cut up alone the paved way which / is harm. Harm is old boat and / a likely dash.
Tender Buttons [Mildred's Umbrella]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra / a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac / and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, / this means a loss a great loss a restitution.
Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, / what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. / What is this current. // What is the wind, what is it. // Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a / dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green / are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes / it. A line just distinguishes it.
Tender Buttons [Milk]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A white egg and a colored pan and a cabbage showing settlement, / a constant increase. // A cold in a nose, a single cold nose / makes an excuse. Two are / more necessary. // All the goods are stolen, all the blisters are in the cup. // Cooking, cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly / sudden very little and all large holes. // A real pint, one that is open and closed and in the middle is / so bad. // Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change, the / meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten. // Guessing again and golfing again and the best men, the very / best men.
Of the Surface of Thing
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
I
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.
II
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
"The spring is like a belle undressing."
III
The gold tree is blue.
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.
The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.
Disillusionments of Ten O'Clock
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green.
Or purple with green rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
Underwoods: Epigram
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)
Of all my verse, like not a single line;
But like my title, for it is not mine.
That title from a better man I stole:
Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole.
To My Mother
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)
You too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet upon the floor.
The Land of Nod
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)
From Breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do--
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day.
Nor can I remember plain and clear
The curious music that I heard.
The Room Is as We Left It
by Marion Strobel (1892-1967)
The room is as we left it
But mellowed to a heightened
Dignity.
The chairs
Have summer coverings
Of cobwebs,
The teakwood lamps are there,
And still the bed sags
To the center,
And the table throws
Its weight of shadow
On the spread. . .
. . .Folly to have left the room unused:
You did not merit such a nicety. . . .
A ragged ache of light
Sifts through the dust:
Blotches
A grotesque of the present
Upon the patterns of the past. . .
My hands are bruised by surfaces
I do not see,
My fingers falter up and down
A tracery of years,
I sense the echo of a voice
I do not hear,
I am not sure the breath I hold
Is mine.
Gitanjali 35
by Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening
thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
from Stray Birds [233-237]
by Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)
233
In heart's perspective the distance looms large.
234
The moon has her light all over the sky, her dark spots to herself.
235
Do not say, "It is morning," and dismiss it with a name of
yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no
name.
236
Smoke boasts to the sky, and Ashes to the earth, that they are
brothers to the fire.
237
The raindrops whispered to the jasmine, "Keep me in your heart
for ever."
The jasmine sighed, "Alas," and dropped to the ground.
Summer Night, Riverside
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
In the wild soft summer darkness
How many and many a night we two together
Sat in the park and watched the Hudson
Wearing her lights like golden spangles,
Glinting on black satin:
The rain along the curving pathway
Was low in a happy place to let us cross,
And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom
Sheltered us,
While your kisses and the flowers,
Falling, falling,
Tangled in my hair. . .
The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.
And now, far off
In the fragrant darkness
The tree is tremulous again with bloom
For June comes back.
To-night what girl
Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair
This year's blossoms, clinging to its coils?
The Carpenter's Son
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
The summer dawn came over-soon,
The earth was like hot iron at noon
In Nazareth;
There fell no rain to ease the heat,
And dusk drew on with tired feet
And stifled breath.
The shop was low and hot and square,
And fresh-cut wood made sharp the air,
While all day long
The saw went tearing through the oak
That moaned as tho' the tree's heart broke
Beneath its wrong.
The narrow street was full of cries,
Of bickering and snarling lies
In many keys
The tongues of Egypt and of Rome
And lands beyond the shifting foam
Of windy seas.
Sometimes a ruler riding fast
Scattered the dark crowds as he passed,
And drove them close
In doorways, drawing broken breath
Lest they be trampled to their death
Where the dust rose.
A Winter Bluejay
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
Crisply the bright snow whispered,
Crunching beneath our feet;
Behind us as we walked along the parkway,
Our shadows danced,
Fantastic shapes in vivid blue.
Across the lake the skaters
Flew to and fro,
With sharp turns weaving
A frail invisible net.
In ecstasy the earth
Drank the silver sunlight;
In ecstasy the skaters
Drank the wine of speed;
In ecstasy we laughed
Drinking the wine of love.
Had not the music of our joy
Sounded its highest note?
But no,
For suddenly, with lifted eyes you said,
"Oh look!"
There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple,
Fearless and gay as our love,
A bluejay cocked his crest!
Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?
The Star
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
A white star born in the evening glow
Looked to the round green world below,
And saw a pool in a wooded place
That held like a jewel her mirrored face.
She said to the pool: "Oh, wondrous deep,
I love you, I give you my light to keep.
Oh, more profound than the moving sea
That never has shown myself to me!
Oh, fathomless as the sky is far,
Hold forever your tremulous star!"
But out of the woods as night grew cool
A brown pig came to the little pool;
It grunted and splashed and waded in
And the deepest place but reached its chin.
The water gurgled with tender glee
And the mud churned up in it turbidly.
The star grew pale and hid her face
In a bit of floating cloud like lace.
Storm Ending
by Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,
Rumbling in the wind,
Stretching clappers to strike our ears. . .
Full-lipped flowers
Bitten by the sun
Bleeding rain
Dripping rain like golden honey--
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.
Reapers
by Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squeaking bleeds,
His belly close to the ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
Nullo
by Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
A spray of pine-needles,
Dipped in western horizon gold,
Fell onto a path.
Dry moulds of cow-hoofs.
In the forest.
Rabbits knew not of their falling.
Nor did the forest catch aflame.
A Cold Heaven
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?
A Man Young and Old:--Human Dignity
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.
So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could roll over if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.
The Balloon of the Mind
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Hands, do what you're bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Leda and the Swan
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating when it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead,
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
The Second Coming
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
To a Stranger
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to
me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste,
matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not
yours only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
When I Read the Book
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)
Song of the Open Road, I
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)
Song of the Open Road, IV
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The pictures alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not
. . . . . wanted, gay fresh sentiment of the
. . . . . round.
O highway I travel, do you say to me "Do not leave me?"
Do you say "Venture not--if you leave me you are lost?"
Do you say "I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied,
. . . . . adhere to me?"
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,
You express me better than I can express myself,
You shall be more to me than my poem.
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv'd in the open air, and all free
. . . . . poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever
. . . . . beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy.
Apostroph
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
O mater! O fils!
O brood continental!
O flowers of the prairies!
O space boundless! O hum of mighty products!
O you teeming cities! O so invincible, turbulent, proud!
O race of the future! O women!
O fathers! O you men of passion and the storm!
O native power only! O beauty!
O yourself! O God! O divine average!
O you bearded roughs! O bards! O all those slumberers!
O arouse! the dawn bird's throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?
O, as I walk'd the beach, I heard the mournful notes foreboding a tempest--the low, oft-repeated
Shriek of the dawn, the long-lived loon;
O I heard, and yet hear, angry thunder;--O you sailors! O ships! make quick preparation!
O from his masterful sweep, the warning cry of the eagle!
(Give way there, all! It is useless! Give up your spoils;)
O sarcasms! Propositions! (O if the whole world prove indeed a sham, a sell!)
O I believe there is nothing real but America and freedom!
O to sternly reject all except Democracy!
O imperator! O who dare confront you and me?
O to promulgate our own! O to build for that which builds for mankind!
O fenillage! O North! O the slope drained by the Mexican sea!
O all, all inseparable--ages, ages, ages!
O a curse on him that would dissever this Union for any reason whatever!
O climates, labors! O good and evil! O death!
O you strong with iron and wood! O Personality!
O the village or place which has the greatest man or woman! even if it be only a few ragged huts;
O the city where women walk in public processions in the streets, the same as the men;
O a wan and terrible emblem, by me adopted!
O shapes arising! Shapes of the future centuries!
O muscle and pluck forever for me!
O workmen and workwomen forever for me!
O farmers and sailors! O drivers of horses forever for me!
O I will make the new bardic list of trades and tools!
O you coarse and wilful! I love you!
O South! O longings for my dear home! O soft and sunny airs!
O pensive! O I must return where the palm grows and the mocking-bird sings, or else I die!
O equality! O organic compacts! I am come to be your born poet!
O whirl, contest, sounding and resounding! I am your poet, because I am part of you;
O days by-gone! Enthusiasts! Anticedents!
O vast preparations for These States! O years!
O what is now being sent forward thousands of years to come!
O mediums! O to teach! To convey the invisible faith!
To promulgate real things! To journey through all The States!
O creation! O to-day! O laws! O unmitigated adoration!
O for mightier broods of orators, artists, and singers!
O for native songs! Carpenter's, boatman's, ploughman's songs! Shoemaker's songs!
O haughtiest growth of time! O free and extatic!
O what I, here, preparing, warble for!
O you hastening light! O the sun of the world will ascent, dazzling, and take his height--and you too will ascend;
O so amazing and so broad! Up there resplendent, darting and burning;
O prophetic! O vision staggered with weight of light! With pouring glories!
O copious! O hitherto unequalled!
O Liberated! O compact! O union impossible to dissever!
O my soul! O lips becoming tremulous, powerless!
O centuries, centuries yet ahead!
O voices of greater orators! I pause--I listen for you
O you States! Cities! Defiant of all outside authority! I spring at once into your arms! You I most love!
O you grand Presidentials! I wait for you! New history!
New heroes! I project you!
Visions of poets! Only you really last! O sweep on! Sweep on!
O Death! O you striding there! O I cannot yet!
O heights! O infinitely too swift and dizzy yet!
O purged lumine, you threaten me more than I can stand!
O present! I return while yet I may to you!
O poets to come, I depend upon you!
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure
them,
When I sitting hear the astronomer where he lectured with much applause
in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, when, on a little promontory,
it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament,
out of itself;
Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,--seeking
the spheres, to
connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd--till the
ductile anchor
hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere,
O my Soul.
The Thinker
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
My wife's new pink slippers
have gay pom-poms.
There is not a spot or a stain
on their satin toes or their sides.
All night they lie together
under her bed's edge.
Shivering I catch sight of them
and smile, in the morning.
Later I watch them
descending the stair,
hurrying through the doors
and round the table,
moving stiffly
with a shake of their gay pom-poms!
And I talk to them
in my secret mind
out of pure happiness.
The Desolate Field
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
Vast and gray, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and gray, and--
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground,
--my head is in the air
but who am I. . . ?
And amazed my heart leaps
at the thought of love
vast and gray
yearning silently over me.
Willow Poem
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
It is a willow when summer is over,
a willow by the river
from which no leaf has fallen nor
bitten by the sun
turned orange or crimson.
The leaves cling and grow paler,
swing and grow paler
over the swirling waters of the river
as if loath to let go,
they are so cool, so drunk with
tar swirl of the wind and of the river--
oblivious to winter,
the last to let go and fall
into the water and on the ground.
Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
All the complicated details
of the attaining and
the disattaining are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
They having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
It Is a Small Plant
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
It is a small plant
delicately branched and
tapering conically
to a point, each branch
and the peak a wire for
green pods, blind lanterns
starting upward from the
stalk each way to
a pair of prickly edged blue
flowerets: it is her regard,
a little plant without leaves,
a finished thing guarding
its secret. Blue eyes--
but there are twenty looks
in one, alike as forty flowers
on twenty stems--Blue eyes
a little closed upon a wish
achieved and half lost again,
stemming back, garlanded
with green sacks of
satisfaction gone to seed,
back to a straight stem--if
one looks into you, trumpets--!
No. It is the pale hollow of
desire itself counting
over and over the moneys of
a stale achievement. Three
small lavender imploring tips
below and above them two
slender colored arrows
of disdain with anthers
between them and
at the edge of the goblet
a white lip, to drink from--!
And summer lifts her look
forty times over, forty times
over--namelessly.
Beauty
by Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)
Say not of Beauty she is good,
Or aught but beautiful,
Or sleek to doves' wings of the wood
Her wild wings of a gull.
Call her not wicked; that word's touch
Consumes her like a curse;
But love her not too much, too much,
For that is even worse.
O she is neither good nor bad,
But innocent and wild!
Enshrine her and she dies, who had
The hard heart of a child.
Anna Akhmatova, Matsuo Basho, Djuna Barnes, William Blake, Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Witter Bynner, Willa Cather, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, Adelaide Crapsey, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, H.D., John Donne, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jessie Redmon Faust, Robert Frost, Tu Fu, Kahlil Gibran, Angelina Weld Grimke, Thomas Hardy, Frances Ellen Walkins Harper, Sadakichi Hartman, Robert Hayden, Earnest Hemingway, Robert Hillyer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, John Keats, Aline Murray Kilmer, Alfred Kreymborg, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, D.H. Lawrence, Emma Lazarus, Janet Loxley Lewis, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Mina Loy, Archibald MacLeish, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Effie Lee Newsome, Yone Noguchi, Li Po, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Lola Ridge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sappho, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Anne Spencer, Leonora Speyer, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marion Strobel, Rabindranath Tagore, Sara Teasdale, Jean Toomer, William Butler Yeats, Elinor Wylie, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams...
(The following poems are in the public domain.)
Solitude
by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
So many stones have been thrown at me,
That I'm not frightened of them anymore,
And the pit has become a solid tower,
Tall among tall towers.
I thank the builders,
May care and sadness pass them by.
From here I'll see the sunrise earlier,
Here the sun's last ray rejoices.
And into the windows of my room
The northern breezes often fly.
And from my hand a dove eats grains of wheat..,
As for my unfinished page,
The Muse's tawny hand, divinely calm
And delicate, will finish it.
For Osip Mandelstam
by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
And over St. Peter's there are poplars, crows.
There's a pale green dome there that glows,
dim in the sun-shrouded dust.
The field of heroes lingers in my thought,
Kulikovos barbarian battleground.
The frozen poplars, like glasses for a toast,
clash now, more noisily, overhead.
As though it was our wedding, and the crowd
were drinking to our health and happiness.
But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard
the room where the exiled poet is banished,
and the night, marching at full pace,
of the coming dawn, has no knowledge.
This Much and More
by Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)
If my lover were a comet
Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
In his hair.
Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
Beneath the loam,
My fingers would learn to dig
And I'd plunge home!
[The Cry of the Cicada]
by Matsuo Basho (1643-1694)
The cry of the cicada
Gives us no sign
That presently it will die.
--translation by William George Aston
Divine Image
by William Blake (1757-1827)
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
When Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
The Tiger
by William Blake (1757-1827)
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of they heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
To Winter
by William Blake (1757-1827)
O winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.
He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheathed
In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes;
For he hath rear'd his sceptor o'er the world.
Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings
To his strong bones, studies o'er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and in his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.
He takes his seat upon the cliffs, the mariner
Cries in vain. Poor little wretch! that deal'st
With storms; till heaven smiles, and the monster
Is driven yelling to his caves beneath Mount Hecla.
The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1671)
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling then is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But not save homespun cloth i' th' house I find.
In this array 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critics' hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
In for thy father asked, say thou had'st none;
And for thy mother, she also is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
Patience Taught by Nature
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861)
"O Dreary life!" we cry, "O dreary life!"
And still the generations of birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife
With Heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land: savannah-swords
Unweary sweep: hills watch, unworn; and rife
Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees,
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory. O thou God of old!
Grant me much patience, as a blade of grass
Grows by contented through the heat and cold.
A Sea-Side Walk
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861)
We walked beside the sea,
After a day which perished silently
Of its own glory, like the Princess weird
Who, combatting the Genius, scorched and seared,
Uttered with burning breath, "Ho! victory!"
And sank adown, on heap of ashes pale;
So runs the Arab tale.
The sky above us showed
An unusual and unmoving cloud,
On which, the cliffs permitted us to see
Only the outline of their majesty,
As master-minds, when gazed at by the crowd!
And, shining with a gloam, the water grey
Swang in its moon-taught way.
Nor moon nor stars were out,
They did not dare to tread so soon about,
Though trembling, in the footsteps of the sun.
The light was neither night's nor day's, but one
Which, life-like, had a beauty in its doubt;
And Silence's impassioned breathings round
Seemed wending into sound.
O solemn-beating heart
Of nature! I have knowledge that thou art
Bound unto man's by cords he cannot sever!
And, what time they are slackened by him ever,
So to attest his own supernal past,
Still runneth thy vibration fast and strong
The slackened cord along.
For though we never spoke
Of the grey water anal the shaded rock,
Dark wave and stone, unconsciously, were fused
Into the plaintive speaking that we used,
Of absent friends and memories unforsook;
And, had we seen each other's face, we had
Seen haply, each was sad.
At the Last
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
There is no denying
That it matters little,
When through a narrow door
We enter a room together,
Which goes after, which before.
Perhaps you are not dying:
Perhaps--there is no knowing--
I shall slip by and turn and laugh with you
Because it mattered so little,
The order of our going.
Undressing You
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
Fiercely I remove from you
All the little vestiges--
Garments that confine you,
Things that touch the flesh,
The wool and the silk
And the linen that entwine you,
Tear them all away from you,
Bare you from the mesh.
And now I have you as you are,
Nothing to encumber you--
But now I see, caressing you,
Colder hands than mine.
They take away your flesh and bone,
And, utterly undressing you,
They tear you from your beauty
And they leave no sign.
At the Touch of You
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
At the touch of you,
As if you were an archer with your swift hand at the bow,
The arrows of delight shot through my body.
You were spring,
And I the edge of a cliff,
And a shining waterfall rushed over me.
Train-Mates
by Witter Bynner (1881-1968)
Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height,
A glory; but a negligible sight,
For you had often seen a mountain-peak
But not my paper. So we came to speak...
A smoke, a smile,-- a good way to commence
The comfortable exchange of difference!
You a young engineer, five feet eleven,
Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven,
Liking a road-bed newly built and clean,
Your fingers hot to cut away the green
Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track
The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,--
And I a poet, wistful of my betters,
Reading George Meredith's high-hearted letters,
Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech
Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each
Absorbing to himself--as I to me
And you to you--a glad identity!
After a time, when others went away,
A curious kinship made us choose to stay,
Which I could tell you now; but at the time
You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme,
Until we found that we were college men
And smoked more easily and smiled again;
And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still:
"I know your fine Greek theatre on the hill
At Berkeley!" With your happy Grecian head
upraised, "I never saw the place," you said--
"Once I was free of class, I always went
Out to the field."
Young engineer, you meant
As a fair tribute to the better part
As ever I did. Beauty of the heart
Is evident in temples. But it breathes
Alive where athletes quicken curly wreaths,
Which are the lovelier because they die.
You are a poet quite as much as I,
Though differences appear in what we do,
And I an athlete as much as you.
Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile
And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile.
Who knows but we shall look again and find
The circus-man and drummer, not behind
But leading in our visible estate--
As discus-thrower and as laureate?
Prairie Dawn
by Willa Cather (1873-1947)
A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
A breaking of the distant table-lands
Through purple mists ascending and the flare
Of water ditches silver in the light;
A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
A sudden sickness for the hills of home.
Garden Abstract
by Hart Crane (1889-1932)
The apple in its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is a prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree;
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
A Man Said to the Universe
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
In the Desert
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
The Impact of a Dollar Upon the Heart
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles wan red light
Sweeping from the heart rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool shadows
Moving swiftly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkys
And yawning emblems of Persia
Checked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
Silly rich peasants stamp the carpets of men,
Dead men who dreamed fragrance and light
Into their woof, their lives;
The rug of an honest bear
Under the feet of a cryptic slave
Who speaks always of baubles,
Forgetting state, multitude, work, and state,
Champing and mouthing of hats,
Making ratful squeak of hats,
Hats.
Untitled
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
Places among the stars,
Soft gardens near the sun,
Keep your distant beauty;
Shed no beams upon my weak heart.
Since she is here
In a place of blackness,
Not your golden days
Nor your silver nights
Can call me to you.
Since she is here
In a place of blackness,
Here I stay and wait.
The Guarded Wound
by Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)
If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!
Saying of Il Haboul
by Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)
My tent
A vapour that
The wind dispels and but
As dust before the wind am I
Myself.
Crepuscule
by E.E. Cummings
I will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burn-
in flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my
body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will I complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
I Died For Beauty, But Was Scarce
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are." he said.
I Had No Time To Hate, Because
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I had no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.
Nor had I time to love; but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers - (314)
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
"Hope" is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all--
And sweetest--in the Gale--is heard--
And sore must be the storm--
That could abash the little Bird--
That kept so many warm--
I've heard it in the chillest land--
And on the strangest Sea--
Yet--never--in Extremity,
It asked a crumb--of me.
I Felt A Funeral In My Brain
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum--
Kept beating--beating--till I thought
My Mind was going numb--
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space--began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here--
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down--
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished, knowing--then--
I Heard A Fly Buzz--When I Died--
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air--
Between the Heaves of Storm--
The Eves around--had wrung them dry--
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset--when the King
Be witnessed--in the Room--
I willed my Keepsakes--Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable--and then it was
There interposed a Fly--
With Blue--uncertain stumbling Buzz--
Between the light--and me--
And then the Windows failed--and then
I could not see to see--
Because I Could Not Stop For Death
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Because I could not stop for Death--
He kindly stopped for me--
The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
And Immortality.
We slowly drove--He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility--
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess--in the Ring--
We passed the fields of Grazing Grain--
We passed the Setting Sun--
Or rather--He passed Us--
The Dews grew quivering and chill--
For only Gossamer, my Gown--
My Tippet--only Tulle--
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground--
The Roof was scarcely visible--
The Cornice--in the Ground--
Since then--'tis Centuries--and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity--
To Make A Prairie It Takes A Clover and One Bee
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,--
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
Sea Iris
by H.D. (1886-1961)
I
Weed, moss-weed,
root tangled in sand,
sea-iris, brittle flower,
one petal like a shell
is broken,
and you print a shadow,
like a thin twig.
Fortunate one,
scented and stinging,
rigid myrrh-bud,
camphor-flower,
sweet and salt--you are wind
in our nostrils.
II
Do the murex-fishers
drench you as they pass?
Do your roots drag up colors
from the sand?
Have they slipped gold under you--
rivets of gold?
Band of iris-flowers
above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.
The Wind Sleepers
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Whiter
than the crust
left by the tide,
we are stung by the hurled sand
and the broken shells.
We no longer sleep
in the wind--
we awoke and fled
through the city gate.
Tear--
tear us an altar,
tug at the cliff-boulders,
pile them with the rough storms--
we no longer
sleep in the wind,
propitiate us.
Chant in a wind
that never halts,
pace a circle and pay tribute
with a song.
When the roar of a dropped wave
breaks into it,
pour meted words
of sea-hawks and full
sad sea-birds that cry
discords.
Orchard
by H.D. (1886-1961)
I saw the first pear
as it fell.
the honey-seeking, golden-bandeds,
the yellow swarm
was not more fleet than I,
(spare us from loveliness)
and I fell prostrate,
crying:
you have flayed us with your blossoms;
spare us the beauty
of fruit-trees.
The honey-seeking
paused not,
the air thundered their song,
and I alone was prostrate.
O rough-hewn
god of the orchard,
I bring you an offering--
do you, alone unbeautiful,
son of the god,
spare us from loveliness:
these fallen hazel-nuts,
stripped late of their green sheath,
the grapes, red-purple,
their berries
dripping with wine,
pomegranates already broken,
and shrunken figs,
and quinces untouched,
I bring you as offering.
Sea Poppies
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?
Oread
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Whirl up, sea--
Whirl your pointed pines
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us--
Cover us with your pools of fire.
Stars Wheel in Purple
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldebaran or Sirius,
not yet the stained and brilliant one of War;
stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiades are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous;
yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.
Sea Lily
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Reed,
slashed and torn
but doubly rich--
such great heads as yours
drift upon temple-steps,
but you are shattered
in the wind.
Myrtle-bark
is flecked from you,
scales are dashed
from your stem,
sand cuts your petal,
furrows it with hard edge,
like flint
on a bright stone.
Yet though the whole wind
slash as your bark,
you are lifted up,
aye--though it hiss
to cover you with froth.
Leda
by H.D. (1886-1961)
Where the slow river
meets the tide,
a red swan lifts red wings
and darker beak,
and underneath the purple down
on his soft breast
uncurls his coral feet.
Through the deep purple
of the dying heat
of sun and mist,
the level ray of sun-beam
has caressed
the lily with dark breast,
and flecked with richer gold
its golden crest.
Where the slow lifting
of the tide,
floats into the river
and slowly drifts
among the reeds,
and lifts the yellow flags,
he floats
where the tide and river meet.
Ah kingly kiss--
no more regret
nor old deep memories
to mar the lilies;
where the low sedge is thick,
the gold day-lily
outspreads and rests
beneath soft fluttering
of red swan wings
and the warm quivering
of the red swan's breast.
Sheltered Garden
by H.D. (1886-1961)
I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.
Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest--
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.
I have had enough--
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.
O for some sharp swish of a branch--
there is no-scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic astringent--
only border on border of scented pinks.
Have you seen fruit under cover
that wasted light--
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost;
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit--
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shriveled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.
Or the melon--
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste--
it is better to taste of frost--
the exquisite frost--
than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves--
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince--
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.
Batter my heart, three-personed God
(Holy Sonnet 14)
by John Donne(1572-1631)
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captivated, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But me betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Not ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Ships That Pass in the Night
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing
I look far out into the pregnant night,
Where I can hear a solemn booming gun
And catch the gleaming of a random light,
That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing.
My tearful eyes my soul's deep hurt are glassing,
For I would hail and check that ship of ships.
I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,
My voice fully dead a foot from mine own lips,
And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.
O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing
O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!
Is there no hope for me? Is there no way
That I may sight and check that speeding bark
Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?
Ode to Ethiopia
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory.
Sad days were those--ah, sad indeed!
But through the land the fruitful seed
Of better times was growing.
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spread its leaves so fresh and young--
Its blossoms now are blowing.
On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiopia's swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbor;
The forests flee before their stroke,
Their hammers ring, their forges smoke,--
They stir in honest labour.
They tread the fields where honor calls;
Their voices sound through senate halls
In majesty and power.
To right they cling; the hymns they sing
Up to the skies in beauty ring,
And bolder grow each hour.
Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire,
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.
Thou has the right to noble pride,
Whose spotless robes were purified
By blood's severe baptism,
Upon thy brow the cross was laid,
And labour's painful sweat-beads made
A consecrating chrism.
No other race, or white or black,
When bound as thou wert, to the rack,
So seldom stooped to grieving;
No other race, when free again,
Forget the past and proved them men
So noble in forgiving.
Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise,
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring,
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's glory.
Encouraged
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
Because you love me I have much achieved,
Had you despised me then I must have failed,
But since I knew you trusted and believed,
I could not disappoint you and so prevailed.
By the Stream
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
By the stream I dream in calm delight, and watch as in a glass,
How the clouds like crowds of snowy-hued and white-robed maidens pass,
And the water into ripples breaks and sparkles as it spreads,
Like a host of armored knights with silver helmets on their heads.
And I deem the stream an emblem fit of human life may go,
For I find a mind may sparkle much and yet but shallows show,
And a soul may glow with myriad lights and wondrous mysteries,
When it only lies a dormant thing and mirrors what it sees.
Character
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
The sun set, but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye;
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:
His action won such reverence sweet
As hid all measure of the feet.
Brahma
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt;
I am the hymn the Brahman sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
La Vie C'est La Vie
by Jessie Redmon Faust
(1882-1961)
On summer afternoons I sit
Quiescent by you in the park
And idly watch the sunbeams gild
And tint the ash-trees' bark.
Or else I watch the squirrels frisk
And chaffer in the grassy lane;
And all the while I mark your voice
Breaking with love and pain.
I know a woman who would give
Her chance of heaven to take my place;
To see the love-light in your eyes,
The love-glow on your face!
And there's a man whose lightest word
Can set my chilly blood afire;
Fulfillment of his least behest
Defines my life's desire.
But he will none of me, nor I
Of you. Nor you of her. 'Tis said
The world is full of jests like these--
I wish that I were dead.
Oriflamme
by Jessie Redmon Faust
(1882-1961)
"I can remember when I was a little, young, girl, how my old mammy would sit out
of doors in the evenings and groan, and I would say,
'Mammy, what makes you groan so?' And she would say, 'I am groaning to think
of my poor children; they do not know where I be and I don't know where they be.
I look up at the stars and they look up at the stars!'"
I think I see her sitting bowed and black,
Stricken and seared with slavery's mortal scars,
Reft of her children, lonely, anguished, yet
Still looking at the stars.
Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,
Pounding our stubborn hearts on Freedom's bars,
Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set,
Still visioning the stars!
Dead Fires
by Jessie Redmon Faust
(1882-1961)
If there is peace, this dead and leaden thing,
Then better far the hateful fret, the sting.
Better the wound forever seeking balm
Than this gray calm!
Is this pain's surcease? Better far the ache,
The long-drawn dreary day, the night's white wake,
Better the choking sigh, the sobbing breath,
Than passion's death!
The Sound of Trees
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door,
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on,
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The Exposed Nest
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But 'twas no make-believe with you to-day,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Still-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover,
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once--could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not want to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven't any memory--have you?--
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.
The River Village
by Tu Fu (712-770)
translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
The river makes a bend and encircles the village with its current.
All the long summer, the affairs and occupations of the river village are quiet
and simple.
The swallows who nest in the beams go and come as they please.
The gulls in the middle of the river enjoy one another, they crowd together and
touch one another.
My old wife paints a chess-board on paper.
My little sons hammer needles to make fish-hooks.
I have many illnesses, therefore my only necessities are medicines.
Besides these, what more can so humble a man as I ask?
On Joy and Sorrow
by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
Then a woman said, Speak to use of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes
filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can
contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in
the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was
hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it
is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see
that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay,
sorrow is greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come and when one sits alone with you at your board,
remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your
joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver,
needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
On Love
by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.
And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there
fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind
lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he
is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest
branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their
clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may
become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the
secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment
of Life's heart.
But if in your heart you would seek only love's peace and love's
pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and
pass out of love's threshing floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of
your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but
rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it
finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desire, let these be your
desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to
the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for
another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart
and a song of praise upon your lips.
El Beso
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
Twilight--and you
Quiet--the stars;
Snare of the shine of your teeth,
Your provocative laughter,
The gloom of your hair;
Lure of you, eye and lip;
Yearning, yearning,
Languor, surrender;
Your mouth,
And madness, madness,
Tremulous, breathless, flaming,
The space of a sigh;
Then awakening--remembrance,
Pain, regret--your sobbing;
And again, quiet--the stars,
Twilight--and you.
To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimke
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
Still are there wonders of the dark and day;
The muted shrillings of shy things at night,
So small beneath the stars and moon;
The peace, dream-frail, but perfect while the light
Lies softly on the leaves at noon.
These are, and these will be
Until Eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.
Each dawn, while yet the east is veiled gray,
The birds about her window wake and sing;
And far away each day some lark
I know is singing where the grasses swing;
Some robin calls and calls at dark.
These are, and these will be
Until Eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.
The wild flowers that she loved down green ways stray;
Her roses lift their wistful buds at dawn,
But not for eyes that loved them best;
Only her little pansies are all gone,
Some lying softly on her breast.
And flowers will bud and be
Until Eternity;
But she who loved them well has gone away.
Where has she gone? And who is there to say?
But this we know: her gentle spirit moves
And is where beauty never wanes,
Perchance by other streams, mid other groves;
And to us here, ah! she remains
A lovely memory,
Until Eternity;
She came, she loved, and then she went away.
To Joseph Lee
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
How strange, how passing strange, when we lie down
To sleep, to know that you are quite
Alone beneath the moon, the stars, the little leaves,
Within the night.
How strange, how passing strange to know--our eyes
Will gladden at the fine sweet sight
Of you no more, for now your face is hid
Within the night.
Strange, strange indeed, these things to us appear
And yet we know they must be right;
And though your body sleeps, your soul has passed
Beyond the night.
Ah! friend it must be sweet to slip from out
The tears, the pain, the losing fight
Below, and rest, just rest eternally
Beyond the night.
And sweet it must be too, to know the kiss
of peace, of Peace, the pure, the white
And step beside her hand in hand quite close
Beyond the night.
The Want of You
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
A hint of gold where the moon will be;
Through the flocking clouds just a star or two;
Leaf sounds, soft and wet and hushed,
And oh! the crying want of you.
The Puppet-Player
by Angelina Weld Grimke
(1880-1958)
Sometimes it seems as though some puppet-player,
A clenched claw cupping a craggy chin
Sits just beyond the border of our seeing,
Twitching the strings with slow, sardonic grin.
He Abjures Love
by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
At last I put off love,
For twice ten years
The daysman of my thought,
And hope, and doing;
Being ashamed thereof,
And faint of fears
And desolations, wrought
in his pursuing,
Since first in youthtime those
Disquietings
That heart-enslavement brings
To hale and hoary,
Became my housefellows,
And, fool and blind,
I turned from kith and kind
To give him glory.
I was as children be
Who have no care;
I did not shrink or sigh,
I did not sicken;
But lo, Love beckoned me,
And I was base,
And poor, and starved, and fry,
And fever-stricken.
Too many times ablaze
With fatuous fires,
Enkindled by his wiles
To new embraces,
Did I, by wilful ways
And baseless ires,
Return the anxious smiles
Of friendly faces.
No more will now rate I
The common rare,
The midnight drizzle less,
The gray hour golden,
The wind a yearning cry,
The faulty fair,
Things dreamt, of comelier here
Than things beholden!. . .
I speak as one who plumbs
Life's dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.
But--after love what comes?
A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
And then, the curtain.
1883
A Kiss
by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
By a wall the stranger now calls his,
Was born of old a particular kiss,
Without forethought in its genesis;
Which in a trace took wing on the air.
And where that spot is nothing shows:
There ivy calmly grows,
And no one knows
What a birth was there!
That kiss is gone where none can tell--
Not even those who felt its spell:
It cannot have died; that know we well,
Somewhere it pursues its flight,
One of a long procession of sounds
Traveling aethereal rounds
Far from earth's bounds
In the infinite.
The Burdens of All
by Frances Ellen Walkins Harper
(1825-1911)
We may o'er the heavy burdens
Of the black, the brown and white;
But if we all clasped hands together
The burdens would be more light.
How to solve life's saddest problems,
Its weariness, want and woe,
Was answered by One who suffered
In Palestine long ago.
He gave from the heart this precept,
To east the burdens of men,
"As he would that others do to you
Do ye even so to them."
Life's heavy, wearisome burdens
Will change to a gracious trust
When men shall learn in the light of God
To be merciful and just.
Where war has sharpened his weapons
And slavery masterful hand,
Let white and black and brown unite
To build the kingdom of God.
And never attempt in madness
To build a kingdom or state,
Through greed or gold or lust of power,
On the crumbling stones of hate.
The burdens will always be heavy,
The sunshine fade into night,
Till mercy and justice shall cement
The black, the brown and the white.
And each shall answer with gladness,
The herald angel's refrain,
When "Peace on earth, good will to men"
Was the burden of their strain.
Why I Love Thee
by Sadakichi Hartman
(1867-1944)
Why I love thee?
Ask why the seawind wanders,
Why the shore is aflush with the tide,
Why the moon through heaven meanders
Like seafaring ships that ride
On a sullen, motionless deep;
Why the seabirds are fluttering the strand
Where the waves sing themselves to sleep
And starshine lives in the curves of the sand!
Those Winter Mornings
by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic anger of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Along With Youth
by Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow-eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boys' letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday's Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.
Montparnasse
by Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows.
No successful suicides.
A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the
dome)
A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.
(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)
They find a model dead
alone in bed and very dead.
(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)
Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.
Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the cafe.
Fog
by Robert Hillyer (1895-1961)
Where does the sea end and the sky begin?
We sink in blue for which there is no word.
Two sails, fog-colored, loiter on thin
Mirage of ocean.
There is no sound of wind, nor wave, nor bird,
Nor any motion.
Except the shifting mists that turn and lift,
Showing behind the two limp sails a third,
Then blotting it again.
A gust, a spattering of rain,
The lazy water breaks in nervous rings
Somewhere a bleak bell buoy sings,
Muffled at first, then clear,
Its wet, gray monotone.
The dead are here,
We are not quite alone.
Fragment
by Gerard Manly Hopkins
(1844-1889)
What being in rank-old nature should earlier have
that breath been
That here personal tells off these heart-song powerful
peals?--
A bush-browed, beetle-browed billow is it?
With a south-westerly wind blustering, with a tide
rolls reels
Of crumbling, fore-foundering, thundering all-surfy
seas in; seen
Underneath, their glassy-barrel, of a fairy green,
Of a jaunting vaunting vaulting assaulting
trumpet telling
The Windhover: To Christ our Lord
by Gerard Manly Hopkins
(1844-1889)
I caught this morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn
Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him stead air,
and striding
High there, how he run upon the rein of a
wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend
the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery
of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride
plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then,
a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my
chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough
down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Peace
by Gerard Manly Hopkins
(1844-1889)
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, sky wings
shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play
hypocrite
To my own heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace
allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does have Patience exquisite,
That plumes to peace thereafter. And when Peace here
does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
My People
by Langston Hughes
(1902-1967)
Dream-singers,
Story-tellers,
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate--
My People.
Dish-washers,
Elevator-boys,
Ladies' maids,
Crap-shooters,
Cooks,
Waiters,
Jazzers,
Nurses of babies,
Loaders of ships,
Porters,
Hairdressers,
Comedians in vaudeville
And band-men in circuses--
Dream-singers all,
Story-tellers all.
Dancers--
God! What dancers!
Singers--
God! What singers!
Singers and dancers,
Dancers and laughers.
Laughers?
Yes, laughers....laughers....laughers--
Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands of Fate.
Before a Painting
by James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
I knew not who had wrought with skill so fine
What I beheld; nor by what laws of art
He had created life and love and heart
On canvas, from mere color, curve and line.
Silent I stood and made no move or sign;
Not with the crowd, but reverently apart;
Nor felt the power my rooted limbs to start,
But mutedly gazed upon that face divine.
And over me the sense of beauty fell,
As music over a raptured listener to
The deep-voiced organ breathing out a hymn;
Or as on one who kneels, his beads to tell,
There falls the aureate glory filtered through
The windows in some old cathedral dim.
Deep in the Quiet Wood
by James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
Are you bowed down in heart?
Do you but hear the clashing discords and the din of life?
Then come away, come to the peaceful wood,
Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,
From out the palpitating solitude
Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains?
They are above, around, within you, everywhere.
Silently, listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.
They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.
Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale
Until, responsive to the tonic chord,
It touches the diapason of God's grand cathedral organ,
Filling earth for you with heavenly peace
And holy harmonies.
Down By the Carib Sea (VI: Sunset in the Tropics)
by James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
A silver flash from the sinking sun,
Then a shot of crimson across the sky
That, bursting, lets a thousand colors fly
And riot among the clouds; they run,
Deepening the purple, flaming in gold,
Changing, and opening fold after fold,
Then fading through all the tints of the rose into gray.
Till, taking quick fright at the coming night,
They rush down the west,
In hurried quest
Of the fleeing day.
Now above where the tardiest color flares a moment yet,
One point of light, now two, now three are set
To form the starry stairs,--
And, in her firefly crown,
Queen Night, on velvet slippered feet, comes softly down.
Sonnet I: To My Brother George
by John Keats (1795-1821)
Many the wonders I this day have seen:
The sun, when first he kissed away the tears
That filled the eyes of Morn; the laureled peers
Who from the feathery gold of evening lean;
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been,
E'en now, dear George, while this for you I write,
Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping
So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,
And she her half-discovered revels keeping
But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonder of the sky and sea?
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
by John Keats (1795-1821)
My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main--
A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
by John Keats (1795-1821)
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who can'st thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels?
What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit deities of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou can'st not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never never can'st thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever big the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy, love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dress?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought;
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Shards
by Aline Murray Kilmer
(1888-1941)
I can never remake the thing I have destroyed;
I brushed the golden dust from the moth's wing,
I called down wind to shatter the cherry-blossoms,
I did a terrible thing.
I feared the cup might fall, so I flung it from me;
I feared that the bird might fly, so I set it free;
I feared that the dam might break, so I loosed the river:
May its waters cover me.
Poetry
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
Ladislaw the critic
is five feet six inches high,
which means
that his eyes
are five feet two inches
from the ground,
which means,
if you read him your poem,
and his eyes lift to five feet
and a trifle more than two inches,
what you have done
is Poetry--
should his eyes remain
at five feet two inches,
you have perpetrated prose,
and do his eyes stoop
--which Heaven forbid!--
the least trifle below
five feet two inches,
you
are an unspeakable adjective.
Cezanne
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
Our door was shut to the noon-day heat.
We could not see him.
We might not have heard him either--
Resting, dozing, dreaming pleasantly.
But his step was tremendous--
Are mountains on the march?
He was no man who passed;
But a great faithful horse
Dragging a load
Up the hill.
Vista
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
The snow,
ah yes, ah yes indeed,
is white and beautiful, white and beautiful,
verily beautiful--
from my window.
The sea, ah yes, ah yes, indeed,
is green and alluring, green and alluring,
verily alluring--
from the shore.
Love, ah yes, ah yes, ah yes indeed,
verily yes, ah yes indeed!
Old Manuscript
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
The sky
is that beautiful old parchment
in which the sun and the moon
keep their diary.
To read it all,
one must be a linguist
more learned than Father Wisdom,
and a visionary
more clairvoyant than mother Dream.
But to feel it,
one must be an apostle:
one who is more than intimate
in having been, always,
the only confidant--
like the earth
or the sea.
Grasses
by Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966)
Who
would decry
instruments--
when grasses
ever so fragile,
provide strings
stout enough for
insect moods
to glide up and down
in glissandos
of toes along wires
or finger-tips on zithers--
though
the mere sounds
be theirs, not ours--
theirs, not ours,
the first inspiration--
discord
without resolution--
who
would cry
being loved,
when even such tinkling
comes of the loving?
Dance
by Alfred Kreymborg
(1883-1966)
Moon dance,
you were not to blame.
Nor you,
lovely white moth.
But I saw you together.
Peace
by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
(1851-1926)
An angel spoke with me, and lo, he hoarded
My falling tears to cheer a flower's face!
For, so it seems, in all the heavenly space
A wasted grief was never yet recorded.
Victorious calm those holy tones afforded
Unto my soul, whose outcry, in disgrace,
Changed to low music, leading to the place
Where, though well armed, with futile end awarded,
My past lay dead, "Wars are of earth!" he cried,
"Endurance only breathes immortal air.
Courage eternal, by a world defied,
Still wears the front of patience, smooth and fair."
Scent of Irises
by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
A faint, sickening scent of irises
Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table
A fine proud spike of purple irises
Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable
To see the class's lifted and bended faces
Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and
sable.
I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless
Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast
you
With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your chin
as you dipped
Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast
you,
Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-
smocks,
Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not outlast.
You amid the bog-end's yellow incantation,
You sitting in the clowslips of the meadow above,
Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-
blobs,
Me full length in the cowslips, muttering your love;
You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent,
You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a dove.
You are always asking, do I remember, remember
The butter-cup bog-end where the flowers rose up
And kindled your own days with a cast of gold?
You ask again, do the healing days close up
The open darkness which then drew us in,
The dark which then drank up our brimming cup.
You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of
night
Burnt like a sacrifice; you invisible,
Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you!
--And, yes, thank God, it is still possible
The healing days shall close the darkness up
Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew.
Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God,
The fire of night is gone, and your face is ash
Indistinguishable on the grey, chill day;
The night has burnt us out, at last the good
Dark fire burns on untroubled, without clash
Of you upon the dead leaves saying me Yea.
Coldness in Love
by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
And you remember, in the afternoon
The sea and the sky went grey, as if there had sunk
A flocculent dust on the floor of the world: the festoon
Of the sky sagged dusty as spider cloth,
And coldness clogged the sea, till it ceased to croon.
A dank, sickening scent came up from the grime
Of weed that blackened the shore, so that I recoiled
Feeling the raw cold dun me: and all the time
You leapt about on the slipping rocks, and threw
Me words that rang with a brassy, shallow chime.
And all day long, that raw and ancient cold
Deadened me through, till the grey downs dulled to
sleep.
Then I longed for you with your mantle of love to fold
Me over, and drive from out of my body the deep
Cold that had sunk to my soul, and there kept hold.
But still to me all evening long you were cold,
And I was numb with a bitter, deathly ache;
Till old days drew me back into their fold,
And dim hopes crowded me warm with
companionship,
And memories clustered me close, and sleep was
cajoled.
And I slept till dawn at the window blew in like dust,
Like a linty, raw-cold dust disturbed from the floor
Of the unswept sea; a grey pale light like must
That settled upon my face and hands till it seemed
To flourish there, as pale mould blooms on a crust.
And I rose in fear, needing you fearfully,
For I thought you were warm as a sudden jet of blood.
I thought I could plunge in your living hotness, and be
Clean of the cold and the must. With my hand on the
latch
I heard you in your sleep speak strangely to me.
And I dared not enter, feeling suddenly dismayed,
So I went and washed my deadened flesh in the sea
And came back tingling clean, but worn and frayed
With cold, like the shell of the moon; and strange it
seems
That my love can dawn in warmth again, unafraid.
A Baby Running Barefoot
by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass
The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind,
They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water;
And the sight of their white play among the grass
Is like a little robin's song, winsome,
Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one flower
For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings.
I long for the baby to wander hither to me
Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water,
So that she can stand on my knee
With her little bare feet in my hands,
Cool like syringa buds,
Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers.
Pentecostal
by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Shall I tell you, then, how it is?
There came a cloven gleam,
Like a tongue of darkened flame,
To burn in me.
And so I seem
To have you still the same
In one world with me.
In the flicker of a flower,
In a worm that is blind, yet strives,
In the mouse that pauses to listen,
Glimmers our
Shadow as well, and deprives
Them none their glisten.
In each shaken morsel
Our shadow trembles
As if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.
We are part in parcel
In shadow, nothing dissembles
Our darkened universe. You understand?
For I have told you plainly how it is.
The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus
(1849-1887)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Austerity
by Janet Loxley Lewis
(1899-1998)
From "Cold Hills"
I have lived so long
On the cold hills alone . . .
I loved the rock
And the lean pine trees,
Hated the life in the turfy meadow,
Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.
I have lived so long
Under the high monotony of starry skies,
I am so cased about
With the clean wind and the cold nights,
People will not let me in
To their warm gardens
Full of bees.
Granadella
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
I cut myself on the thought of you,
And yet I come back to it again and again,
A kind of fury makes me want to draw you out
From the dimness of the present
And set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.
Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,
I touch the blade of you and cling upon it,
And only when the blood runs out across my fingers
Am I at all satisfied.
Vintage
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
I will mix me a drink of stars,--
Large stars with polychrome needles,
Small stars jetting maroon and crimson,
Cool, quiet, green stars.
I will tear them out of the sky,
And squeeze them over an old silver cup,
And I will pour the cold scorn of my Beloved into it,
So that my drink shall be bubbled with ice.
It will lap and scratch
As I swallow it down;
And I shall feel it as a serpent of fire,
Coiling and twisting in my belly.
His snortings will rise to my head,
And I shall be hot, and laugh,
Forgetting that I have ever known a woman.
A Decade
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
The Captured Goddess
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Over the housetops,
Above the rotating chimney-pots,
I have seen a shiver of amethyst,
And blue and cinnamon have flickered
A moment,
At the far end of a dusty street.
Through sheeted rain
Has come a lustre of crimson,
And I have watched moonbeams
Hushed by a film of palest green.
It was her wings,
Goddess!
Who stepped over the clouds,
And laid her rainbow-feathers
Aslant on the currents of air.
I followed her for long,
With gazing eyes and stumbling feet.
I cared not where she led me,
My eyes were full of colors:
Saffrons, rubies, the yellows of beryls,
And the indigo blue of quarts;
Flights of rose, layers of chrysoprase,
Points of orange, spirals of vermilion,
The spotted gold of tiger-lily petals,
The loud pink of bursting hydrangeas.
I followed
And watched for the flashing of her wings.
In the city I found her,
The narrow-streeted city.
In the market-place I came upon her,
Bound and trembling.
Her fluted wings were fastened to her sides with cords,
She was naked and cold,
For that day the wind blew
Without sunshine.
Men chaffered for her
They bargained in silver and gold,
In copper, in wheat,
And called their bids across the market-place.
The Goddess wept.
Hiding my face I fled,
And the green wind hissed behind me,
Along the narrow streets.
Autumn
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia,
Opulent, flaunting.
Round gold
Flung out of a pale green stalk.
Round, ripe gold
Of maturity,
Meticulously frilled and flaming,
A fire-ball of proclamation:
Fecundity decked in staring yellow
For all the world to see.
They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,
To me who am barren
Shall I send it to you,
You who have taken with you
All I once possessed?
Lacquer Prints
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
One night
When there was a clear moon,
I sat down
To write a poem
About maple trees.
But the dazzle of moonlight
In the ink
Blinded me,
And I could only write
What I remembered.
Therefore, on the wrapping of my poem
I have inscribed your name.
Grotesque
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Why do the lilies goggle their tongues at me
When I pluck them;
And writhe, and twist,
And strangle themselves against my fingers,
So that I can hardly weave the garland
For your hair?
Why do they shriek your name
And spit at me
When I would cluster them?
Must I kill them
To make them lie still,
And send you a wreath of lolling corpses
To turn putrid and soft
On your forehead
While you dance?
Epilogue
by Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Love Songs (Section III)
by Mina Loy (1882-1966)
We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips.
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings.
Songs to Joannes, V
by Mina Loy (1882-1966)
Midnight empties the street
Of all but us
Three
I am undecided which way back
To the left a boy
--One wing has been washed in the rain
The other will never be clean any more--
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are smug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
--The poor can't wash in hot water--
And I don't know which turning to take
Since you got home to yourself--first
Soul-Sight
by Archibald MacLeish
(1892-1982)
Like moon-dark, like brown water your escape,
O laughing mouth, O sweet uplifted lips.
Within the peering brain old ghosts take shape;
You flame and wither as the white foam slips
Back from the broken wave: sometimes a start,
A gesture of the hands, a way you own
Of bending that smooth head above your heart,--
Then these are vanished, then the dream is gone.
Oh, you are too much mine and flesh of me
To seal upon the brain, who in the blood
Are so intense a pulse, so swift a flood
Of beauty, such unceasing instancy.
Dear unimagined brow, unvisioned face,
All beauty has become your dwelling place.
I Know My Soul
by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
I plucked my soul out of its secret place,
And held it to the mirror of my eye,
To see it like a star against the sky,
A twitching body quivering in space,
A spark of passion shining on my face.
And I explored it to determine why
This awful key to my infinity
Conspires to rob me of sweet joy and grace.
And if the sign may not be fully read,
If I can comprehend but not control,
I need not gloom my days with futile dread,
Because I see a part and not the whole.
Contemplating the strange, I'm comforted
By this narcotic thought: I know my soul.
Heritage
by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.
And suddenly some secret spring's released,
And unawares a riddle is revealed,
And I can read like large, black-lettered print,
What seemed before a thing forever sealed.
I know the magic word, the graceful thought,
The song that fills me in my lucid hours,
The spirit's wine that thrills my body through,
And makes me music-drunk, are yours, all yours.
I cannot praise, for you have passed from praise,
I have no tinted thoughts to paint you true;
But I can feel and I can write the word;
The best of me is but the least of you.
To O.E.A.
by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
Your voice is the color of a robin's breast,
And there's a sweet sob in it like rain--still rain in the night.
Among the leaves of the trumpet-tree, close to his nest,
The pea-dove sings, and each note thrills me with strange delight
Like the words, wet with music, that well from your trembling throat.
I'm afraid of your eyes, they're so bold,
Searching me through, reading my thoughts, shining with gold.
But sometimes they are gentle and soft like the dew on the lips of the eucharis
Before the sun comes warm with his lover's kiss,
You are sea-foam, pure with the star's loveliness,
Not mortal, a flower, a fairy, too fair for the beauty-born earth,
All wonderful things, all beautiful things, gave of their wealth to your birth--
O I love you so much, not recking of passion, that I feel it is wrong,
But men will love you, flower, fairy, non-mortal spirit burdened with flesh,
Forever, life-long.
Sonnet I
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,--no,
Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies,--I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist,--with moonlight so.
Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink--and live--what has destroyed some men.
First Fig
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!
I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear (Sonnet IV)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protect you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,--
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily,
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing.
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Ebb
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
The Fish
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices--
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink--
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice--
all the physical features of
ac-
cident--lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
Poetry
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the geniune.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us--that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance
of their opinion--
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Feed Me. Also, River God
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
Lest by diminished vitality and abated
vigilance, I become food for crocodiles--for that quicksand
of gluttony which is legion. It is then close at hand--
on either side
of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride
and stoutness of heart: "The bricks are fallen down, we will
build with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down, we will
change to cedars?" I am not ambitious to dress stones, to
renew forts, nor to match
my value in action, against their ability to catch
up with arrested prosperity. I am not like
them, indefatigable, but if you are a god, you will
not discriminate against me: Yet--if you may fulfill
none but prayer dressed
as gifts in return for your gifts--disregard the request.
Silence
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat--
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from
its mouth--
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my
house your inn."
Inns are not residences.
A Jelly-Fish
by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent--
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it--
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.
To the Negro Farmer of the United States
by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
(1875-1935)
God washes clean the souls and hearts of you,
His favored ones, whose backs bend o'er the soil,
Which grudging gives to them requite for toil
In sober graces and in vision true.
God places in your hands the pow'r to do
A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil
The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil
Of Life's activities. Yet all too few
Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature's heart;
The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast
Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart
Of war within your hands, but pow'r to start
Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest
To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.
The Bronze Legacy
by Effie Lee Newsome
(1885-1978)
To a Brown Boy
'Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown,
Like the strongest things that make up this earth,
Like the mountains grave and grand,
Even like the very land,
Even like the trunks of trees--
Even oaks to be like these!
God builds His strength in bronze.
To be brown like thrush and lark!
Like the subtle wren so dark!
Nay, the king of beasts wears brown;
Eagles are of this same hue.
I thank God, then, I am brown.
Brown has mighty things to do.
Peacock Feather
by Effie Lee Newsome
(1885-1978)
Heav'n's deepest blue,
Earth's richest green,
Minted dust of stars,
Molten sunset sheen,
are blent together
On this lithe brown feather,
In a disk of light--
Lithe, light!
The Poet
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Comes like the stir of the day:
One whose breath is an odour,
Whose eyes show the road to stars,
The breeze in his face,
The glory of Heaven on his back.
He steps like a vision hung in air,
Diffusing the passion of Eternity;
His abode is the sunlight of morn,
The music of eve his speech:
In his sight,
One shall turn from the dust of the grave,
And move upward to the woodland.
Upon the Heights
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
And victor of life and silence,
I stood upon the Heights; triumphant,
With upturned eyes, I stood,
And smiled unto the sun, and sang
A beautifully sad farewell unto the dying day.
And my thoughts and the eve gathered
Their serpentine mysteries around me,
My thoughts like alien breezes,
The eve like a fragrant legend.
My feeling was that I stood as one
Serenely poised for flight, as a muse
Of golden melody and lofty grace.
Yes I stood as one scorning the swords
And wanton menace of the cities.
The sun had heavily sunk into the seas beyond,
And left me a tempting sweet and twilight.
The eve with trailing shadows westward
Swept on, and the lengthened shadows of trees
Disappeared: how silently the songs of silence
Steal into my soul! And still I stood
Among the crickets, in the beauteous profundity
Sung by stars; and I saw me
Softly melted into the eve. The moon
Slowly rose: my shadow on the ground
Dreamily began a dreamy roam,
And I upward smiled silent welcome.
Where Is The Poet
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
The inky-garmented, truth-dead Cloud--woven by dumb ghost alone in
the darkness of phantasmal mountain-mouth--kidnapped the
maiden Moon, silence-faced, love-mannered, mirroring her golden
breast on silvery rivulets:
The Wind, her lover, grey-haired in one moment, crazes around the
Universe, hunting her dewy love-letters, strewn secretly upon the
oat-carpets of the open field.
O, drama! never performed, never gossiped, never rhymed! Behold--to
the blind beast, ever tearless, iron-hearted, the Heaven has no
mouth to interpret these tidings!
Ah, where is the man who lives out of himself? the poet inspired often
to chronicle these tidings?
I Am Like A Leaf
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
The silence is broken: into the nature
My soul sails out,
Carrying the song of life on his brow,
To meet the flowers and birds.
When my heart returns in the solitude,
She is very sad,
Looking back on the dead passions
Lying on Love's ruin.
I am like a leaf
Hanging over hope and despair,
Which trembles and joins
The world's imagination and ghost.
[The faint shadow of the morning moon?]
by Yone Noguchi
(1875-1947)
The faint shadow of the morning moon?
Nay, the snow falling on the earth.
The mist of blooming flowers?
Nay, poetry smiling up at the sky.
In the Mountains on a Summer Day
by Li Po
Tang Dynasty (701-762)
Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.
--Translated by Arthur Waley 1919
Looking at the Moon after Rain
by Li Po
Tang Dynasty (701-762)
The heavy clouds are broken and blowing,
And once more I can see the wide common stretching beyond the four sides of
the city.
Open the door. Half of the moon-toad is already up,
The glimmer of it is like smooth hoar-frost spreading over ten thousand li.
The river is a flat, shining chain.
The moon, rising, is a white eye to the hills;
After it has risen, it is the bright heart of the sea.
Because I love it--so--round as a fan,
I hum songs until the dawn.
--Translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
To the River
by Edgar Allen Poe
(1809-1849)
Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow
Of crystal, wandering water,
Thou art an emblem of the glow
Of beauty, the unhidden heart,
The playful moziness of art
In old Alberto's daughter;
But when within thy wave she looks,
Which glistens then, and trembles,
Why, then the prettiest of brooks
Her worshiper resembles;
For in his heart, as in thy stream,
Her image deeply lies,
His heart which trembles at the beam
Of her soul-searching eyes.
A Dream within a Dream
by Edgar Allen Poe
(1809-1849)
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
This much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
"One" from the pitiless wave?
Is "all" that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Epitaph X on Mr. Elijah Fenton, at Easthamstead, in Berks, 1730
by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
This modest stone, what few vain marbles can,
May truly say, Here lies an honest man:
A poet, blest beyond the poet's fate,
Whom Heaven kept sacred from the proud and great:
Foe to loud praise, and friend to learned ease,
Content with science in the vale of peace.
Calmly he look'd on either life, and here
Saw nothing to regret, or there to fear;
From Nature's temperate feast rose satisfied,
Thank'd Heaven that he had lived, and the he had died.
Francesca
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
You came out of the night
And there were flowers in your hands,
Now you will come out of a confusion of people,
Out of a turmoil of speech about you.
I who have seen you amid the primal things
Was angry when they spoke your name
In ordinary places.
I would that the cool waves might
Flow over my mind,
And that the world should be
Dry as a dead leaf,
Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away,
So that I might find you again,
Alone.
Coda
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
O my songs
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into
people's faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?
The Sea of Glass
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of fires
with gold glories behind them.
Come My Cantilations
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Come my cantilations,
Let us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done
with them,
Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind,
Let me be free of pavements,
Let me be free of the printers.
Let come beautiful people
Wearing raw silk of good colour,
Let come the graceful speakers,
Let come the ready of wit,
Let come the gay of manner; the insolent and the
exulting,
We speak of burnished lakes,
And of dry air, as clean as metal.
The Coming of War: Actaeon
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
An image of Lethe,
and the fields
Full of faint light
but golden,
Gray cliffs,
and beneath them
A sea
Harsher than granite,
unstill, never ceasing;
High forms
with movement of gods,
Perilous aspect;
And one said:
"This is Actaeon."
Actaeon of golden greaves!
Over fair meadow,
Over the cool face of that field,
Unstill, ere moving,
Host of an ancient people,
The silent cortege.
The Sea of Glass
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of faces
with gold glories behind them.
Secrets
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
Secrets
infesting my half-sleep...
did you enter my wound from another wound
brushing mine in a crowd...
or did I snare you on my sharper edges
as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up
carries off spiders on its wings?
Secrets,
running over my soul without sound,
only when dawn comes tip-toeing
ushered by a suave wind,
and dreams disintegrate
like breath shapes in frosty air,
I shall overhear you, bare-foot,
scatting off into the darkness...
I shall know you, secrets,
by the litter you have left
and by your bloody foot-prints.
North Wind
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
I love you, malcontent
Male wind--
Shaking the pollen from a flower
Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.
Blow on and over my dreams...
Scatter my sick dreams...
Throw your lusty arms about me...
Envelop all my hot body...
Carry me to pine forests--
Great, rough-bearded forests..
Bring me to stark plains and steppes...
I would have the North tonight--
The cold, enduring North.
And if we should meet the Snow,
Whirling in spirals,
And he should blind my eyes...
Ally, you will defend me--
You will hold me close,
Blowing on my eyelids.
Potpourri
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
Do you remember
Honey-melon moon
Dripping thick sweet light
Where Canal Street saunters off by herself among quiet trees?
And the faint decayed patchouli--
Fragrance of New Orleans
Like a dead tube rose
Upheld in the warm air...
Miraculously whole.
Debris
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,
Or shudder and hood up their souls--
Those ruined ones,
Where Liberty has lodge an hour
And passed like flame,
Bursting asunder the too small house.
Interim
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
The earth is motionless
And poised in space...
A great bird resting in its flight
Between the alleys of the stars.
It is the wind's hour off....
The wind has nestled down among the corn....
The two speak privately together,
Awaiting the whirr of wings.
Altitude
by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one clearly,
as with a new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.
Presaging
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(1873-1926)
I am like a flag unfurled in space,
I scent the oncoming winds and must bend with them,
While the things beneath are not yet stirring,
While doors close gently and there's silence in the chimneys
And the windows do not yet tremble and the dust is still heavy--
Then I feel the storm and am vibrant like the sea
And expand and withdraw into myself
And thrust myself forth am alone in the great storm.
What Will You Do God?
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)
Translated by B. Deutsch and A. Yarmolinsky
What will you do, God, when I die?
I am your jar (if cracked, I lie?)
Your well-spring (if this will go dry?)
I am your craft, your vesture I--
You lose your purport, losing me.
When I go, your cold house will be
Empty of words that made it sweet.
I am the sandals your bare feet
Will seek and long for, wearily.
Your cloak will fall from aching bones.
Your glance, that my warm cheeks have cheered
As with a cushion long endeared,
Will wonder at a loss so weird;
And, when the sun has disappeared,
Lie in the lap of alien stones.
What will you do, God? I am feared.
XII
by Sappho (615BC-550BC)
In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born,
And said to her,
"Mother of beauty, mother of joy,
Why hast thou given to men
"This thing called love, like the ache of a wound
In beauty's side,
To burn and throb and be quelled for an hour
and never wholly depart?"
And the daughter of Cyprus said to me,
"Child of the earth,
Behold, all things are born and attain,
But only as they desire,--
"The sun that is strong, the gods that are wise,
The loving heart,
Deeds and knowledge and beauty and joy,--
But before all else was desire."
Sonnet XVIII
by William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often in his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The Sonnets XXXVIII
by William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
How can my muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O! give thy self the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy personal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thy self dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymes invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
(Sonnet 65)
by William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o'er sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822)
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;
Whereupon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
'Tis the melodious here of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As [ ] grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles on each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hues
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a broken glare
Kindled by that inextricable error;
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there--
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.
Translation
by Anne Spencer (1882-1975)
He trekked into a far country,
My friend and I.
Our deeper content was never spoken,
But each knew all the other said.
He told me how calm his soul was laid
By the love of anvil and strife.
"The wooing kestrel," I said, "mutes his
mating-note
To please the harmony of this sweet silence."
And when at the day's end
We laid tired bodies 'gainst
The loose warm sands,
And the air fleeced its particles for a coverlet;
When star after star came out
To guard these lovers in oblivion--
My soul so leapt that my evening prayer
Stole my morning song!
Lines to a Nasturtium
by Anne Spencer (1882-1975)
"A lover muses"
Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,
I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?
A bird, next, small and humming,
Looked into your startled depths and fled. . .
Surely, some dread sight, and dafter
Than human eyes as mine can see,
Set the stricken air waves drumming
In his flight.
Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see, I cannot hear your fluty
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are in beauty
Born in vain;
Hair like the setting sun,
Her eyes a rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar
All your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet. . .
Ah, how the senses flood at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies
Beating, beating.
At the Carnival
by Anne Spencer (1882-1975)
Gay little Girl-of-the-Diving-Tank,
I desire a name for you.
Nice, as a right glove fits;
For you--who amid the malodorous
Mechanics of this unlovely thing,
Are darling of spirit and form.
I know you--a glance, and what you are
Sits-by-the-fire in my heart.
My Limousine-Lady knows you, or
Why does the slant-envy of her eye mark
Your straight air and radiant inclusive smile?
Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.
The bull-necked man knows you--this first time
His itching flesh sees form divine and vibrant health
And thinks not of his avocation.
I came curiously--
Set on no diversion, save that thy mind
Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds
In the presence of a blind crowd.
The color of life was gray.
Everywhere the setting seemed right
For my mood.
Here the sausage and garlic booth
Sent unholy incense skyward;
There a quivering female-thing
Gestured assignations, and lied
To call it dancing;
There, too, were games of chance
With chances for none;
But oh! Girl-of-the-Tank, at last!
Gleaming Girl, how intimately pure and free
The gaze you send the crowd,
As though you know the dearth of beauty
In its sordid life.
We need you--my Limousine-Lady,
The bull-necked man and I.
Seeing you here brave and water-clean,
Leaven for the heavy ones of earth,
I am swift to feel that what makes
The plodder glad is good; and
Whatever is good is God.
The wonder is that you are here;
I have seen the queer in queer places,
But never before a heaven-fed
Naiad of the Carnival-Tank!
Little Diver, Destiny for you,
Like as for me, is shod in silence;
Years may seep into your soul
The bacilli of the usual and the expedient;
I implore Neptune to claim his child to-day!
The Locust
by Leonora Speyer (1872-1956)
Its hot voice sizzles from some cool tree
Near-by:
It seems to burn its way through the air
Like a small, pointed flame of sound
Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.
Tender Buttons [A Light in the Moon]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sen- /sible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many / declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice / and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat / and a vacation and even more noise than cutting,
notwithstanding / Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding / an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cul- / tivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the / ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, / not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special reso- / lution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the / rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care / with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with / which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a mag- / nificent asparagus, and also a fountain.
Tender Buttons [Asparagus]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet / wet weather wet weather wet.
Tender Buttons [A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a / single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All / this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The differ- / ence is spreading.
Tender Buttons [Nothing Elegant]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is / a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and these places change then / certainly something is upright. It is earnest.
Tender Buttons [A Red Stamp]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even / dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if / they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they / do this they need a catalogue.
Tender Buttons [Eggs]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a little sudden mill. // Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady. // In white in white handerkerchiefs / with little dots in a white belt all / shadows are singular and procured and relieved. // Not that is not the cows shame and a precocious sound, it is a bite. // Cut up alone the paved way which / is harm. Harm is old boat and / a likely dash.
Tender Buttons [Mildred's Umbrella]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra / a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac / and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, / this means a loss a great loss a restitution.
Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, / what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. / What is this current. // What is the wind, what is it. // Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a / dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green / are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes / it. A line just distinguishes it.
Tender Buttons [Milk]
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
A white egg and a colored pan and a cabbage showing settlement, / a constant increase. // A cold in a nose, a single cold nose / makes an excuse. Two are / more necessary. // All the goods are stolen, all the blisters are in the cup. // Cooking, cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly / sudden very little and all large holes. // A real pint, one that is open and closed and in the middle is / so bad. // Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change, the / meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten. // Guessing again and golfing again and the best men, the very / best men.
Of the Surface of Thing
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
I
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.
II
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
"The spring is like a belle undressing."
III
The gold tree is blue.
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.
The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.
Disillusionments of Ten O'Clock
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green.
Or purple with green rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
Underwoods: Epigram
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)
Of all my verse, like not a single line;
But like my title, for it is not mine.
That title from a better man I stole:
Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole.
To My Mother
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)
You too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet upon the floor.
The Land of Nod
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)
From Breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do--
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day.
Nor can I remember plain and clear
The curious music that I heard.
The Room Is as We Left It
by Marion Strobel (1892-1967)
The room is as we left it
But mellowed to a heightened
Dignity.
The chairs
Have summer coverings
Of cobwebs,
The teakwood lamps are there,
And still the bed sags
To the center,
And the table throws
Its weight of shadow
On the spread. . .
. . .Folly to have left the room unused:
You did not merit such a nicety. . . .
A ragged ache of light
Sifts through the dust:
Blotches
A grotesque of the present
Upon the patterns of the past. . .
My hands are bruised by surfaces
I do not see,
My fingers falter up and down
A tracery of years,
I sense the echo of a voice
I do not hear,
I am not sure the breath I hold
Is mine.
Gitanjali 35
by Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening
thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
from Stray Birds [233-237]
by Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)
233
In heart's perspective the distance looms large.
234
The moon has her light all over the sky, her dark spots to herself.
235
Do not say, "It is morning," and dismiss it with a name of
yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no
name.
236
Smoke boasts to the sky, and Ashes to the earth, that they are
brothers to the fire.
237
The raindrops whispered to the jasmine, "Keep me in your heart
for ever."
The jasmine sighed, "Alas," and dropped to the ground.
Summer Night, Riverside
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
In the wild soft summer darkness
How many and many a night we two together
Sat in the park and watched the Hudson
Wearing her lights like golden spangles,
Glinting on black satin:
The rain along the curving pathway
Was low in a happy place to let us cross,
And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom
Sheltered us,
While your kisses and the flowers,
Falling, falling,
Tangled in my hair. . .
The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.
And now, far off
In the fragrant darkness
The tree is tremulous again with bloom
For June comes back.
To-night what girl
Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair
This year's blossoms, clinging to its coils?
The Carpenter's Son
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
The summer dawn came over-soon,
The earth was like hot iron at noon
In Nazareth;
There fell no rain to ease the heat,
And dusk drew on with tired feet
And stifled breath.
The shop was low and hot and square,
And fresh-cut wood made sharp the air,
While all day long
The saw went tearing through the oak
That moaned as tho' the tree's heart broke
Beneath its wrong.
The narrow street was full of cries,
Of bickering and snarling lies
In many keys
The tongues of Egypt and of Rome
And lands beyond the shifting foam
Of windy seas.
Sometimes a ruler riding fast
Scattered the dark crowds as he passed,
And drove them close
In doorways, drawing broken breath
Lest they be trampled to their death
Where the dust rose.
A Winter Bluejay
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
Crisply the bright snow whispered,
Crunching beneath our feet;
Behind us as we walked along the parkway,
Our shadows danced,
Fantastic shapes in vivid blue.
Across the lake the skaters
Flew to and fro,
With sharp turns weaving
A frail invisible net.
In ecstasy the earth
Drank the silver sunlight;
In ecstasy the skaters
Drank the wine of speed;
In ecstasy we laughed
Drinking the wine of love.
Had not the music of our joy
Sounded its highest note?
But no,
For suddenly, with lifted eyes you said,
"Oh look!"
There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple,
Fearless and gay as our love,
A bluejay cocked his crest!
Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?
The Star
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
A white star born in the evening glow
Looked to the round green world below,
And saw a pool in a wooded place
That held like a jewel her mirrored face.
She said to the pool: "Oh, wondrous deep,
I love you, I give you my light to keep.
Oh, more profound than the moving sea
That never has shown myself to me!
Oh, fathomless as the sky is far,
Hold forever your tremulous star!"
But out of the woods as night grew cool
A brown pig came to the little pool;
It grunted and splashed and waded in
And the deepest place but reached its chin.
The water gurgled with tender glee
And the mud churned up in it turbidly.
The star grew pale and hid her face
In a bit of floating cloud like lace.
Storm Ending
by Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,
Rumbling in the wind,
Stretching clappers to strike our ears. . .
Full-lipped flowers
Bitten by the sun
Bleeding rain
Dripping rain like golden honey--
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.
Reapers
by Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squeaking bleeds,
His belly close to the ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
Nullo
by Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
A spray of pine-needles,
Dipped in western horizon gold,
Fell onto a path.
Dry moulds of cow-hoofs.
In the forest.
Rabbits knew not of their falling.
Nor did the forest catch aflame.
A Cold Heaven
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?
A Man Young and Old:--Human Dignity
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.
So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could roll over if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.
The Balloon of the Mind
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Hands, do what you're bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Leda and the Swan
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating when it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead,
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
The Second Coming
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
To a Stranger
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to
me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste,
matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not
yours only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
When I Read the Book
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)
Song of the Open Road, I
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)
Song of the Open Road, IV
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The pictures alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not
. . . . . wanted, gay fresh sentiment of the
. . . . . round.
O highway I travel, do you say to me "Do not leave me?"
Do you say "Venture not--if you leave me you are lost?"
Do you say "I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied,
. . . . . adhere to me?"
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,
You express me better than I can express myself,
You shall be more to me than my poem.
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv'd in the open air, and all free
. . . . . poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever
. . . . . beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy.
Apostroph
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
O mater! O fils!
O brood continental!
O flowers of the prairies!
O space boundless! O hum of mighty products!
O you teeming cities! O so invincible, turbulent, proud!
O race of the future! O women!
O fathers! O you men of passion and the storm!
O native power only! O beauty!
O yourself! O God! O divine average!
O you bearded roughs! O bards! O all those slumberers!
O arouse! the dawn bird's throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?
O, as I walk'd the beach, I heard the mournful notes foreboding a tempest--the low, oft-repeated
Shriek of the dawn, the long-lived loon;
O I heard, and yet hear, angry thunder;--O you sailors! O ships! make quick preparation!
O from his masterful sweep, the warning cry of the eagle!
(Give way there, all! It is useless! Give up your spoils;)
O sarcasms! Propositions! (O if the whole world prove indeed a sham, a sell!)
O I believe there is nothing real but America and freedom!
O to sternly reject all except Democracy!
O imperator! O who dare confront you and me?
O to promulgate our own! O to build for that which builds for mankind!
O fenillage! O North! O the slope drained by the Mexican sea!
O all, all inseparable--ages, ages, ages!
O a curse on him that would dissever this Union for any reason whatever!
O climates, labors! O good and evil! O death!
O you strong with iron and wood! O Personality!
O the village or place which has the greatest man or woman! even if it be only a few ragged huts;
O the city where women walk in public processions in the streets, the same as the men;
O a wan and terrible emblem, by me adopted!
O shapes arising! Shapes of the future centuries!
O muscle and pluck forever for me!
O workmen and workwomen forever for me!
O farmers and sailors! O drivers of horses forever for me!
O I will make the new bardic list of trades and tools!
O you coarse and wilful! I love you!
O South! O longings for my dear home! O soft and sunny airs!
O pensive! O I must return where the palm grows and the mocking-bird sings, or else I die!
O equality! O organic compacts! I am come to be your born poet!
O whirl, contest, sounding and resounding! I am your poet, because I am part of you;
O days by-gone! Enthusiasts! Anticedents!
O vast preparations for These States! O years!
O what is now being sent forward thousands of years to come!
O mediums! O to teach! To convey the invisible faith!
To promulgate real things! To journey through all The States!
O creation! O to-day! O laws! O unmitigated adoration!
O for mightier broods of orators, artists, and singers!
O for native songs! Carpenter's, boatman's, ploughman's songs! Shoemaker's songs!
O haughtiest growth of time! O free and extatic!
O what I, here, preparing, warble for!
O you hastening light! O the sun of the world will ascent, dazzling, and take his height--and you too will ascend;
O so amazing and so broad! Up there resplendent, darting and burning;
O prophetic! O vision staggered with weight of light! With pouring glories!
O copious! O hitherto unequalled!
O Liberated! O compact! O union impossible to dissever!
O my soul! O lips becoming tremulous, powerless!
O centuries, centuries yet ahead!
O voices of greater orators! I pause--I listen for you
O you States! Cities! Defiant of all outside authority! I spring at once into your arms! You I most love!
O you grand Presidentials! I wait for you! New history!
New heroes! I project you!
Visions of poets! Only you really last! O sweep on! Sweep on!
O Death! O you striding there! O I cannot yet!
O heights! O infinitely too swift and dizzy yet!
O purged lumine, you threaten me more than I can stand!
O present! I return while yet I may to you!
O poets to come, I depend upon you!
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure
them,
When I sitting hear the astronomer where he lectured with much applause
in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, when, on a little promontory,
it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament,
out of itself;
Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,--seeking
the spheres, to
connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd--till the
ductile anchor
hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere,
O my Soul.
The Thinker
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
My wife's new pink slippers
have gay pom-poms.
There is not a spot or a stain
on their satin toes or their sides.
All night they lie together
under her bed's edge.
Shivering I catch sight of them
and smile, in the morning.
Later I watch them
descending the stair,
hurrying through the doors
and round the table,
moving stiffly
with a shake of their gay pom-poms!
And I talk to them
in my secret mind
out of pure happiness.
The Desolate Field
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
Vast and gray, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and gray, and--
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground,
--my head is in the air
but who am I. . . ?
And amazed my heart leaps
at the thought of love
vast and gray
yearning silently over me.
Willow Poem
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
It is a willow when summer is over,
a willow by the river
from which no leaf has fallen nor
bitten by the sun
turned orange or crimson.
The leaves cling and grow paler,
swing and grow paler
over the swirling waters of the river
as if loath to let go,
they are so cool, so drunk with
tar swirl of the wind and of the river--
oblivious to winter,
the last to let go and fall
into the water and on the ground.
Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
All the complicated details
of the attaining and
the disattaining are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
They having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
It Is a Small Plant
by William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
It is a small plant
delicately branched and
tapering conically
to a point, each branch
and the peak a wire for
green pods, blind lanterns
starting upward from the
stalk each way to
a pair of prickly edged blue
flowerets: it is her regard,
a little plant without leaves,
a finished thing guarding
its secret. Blue eyes--
but there are twenty looks
in one, alike as forty flowers
on twenty stems--Blue eyes
a little closed upon a wish
achieved and half lost again,
stemming back, garlanded
with green sacks of
satisfaction gone to seed,
back to a straight stem--if
one looks into you, trumpets--!
No. It is the pale hollow of
desire itself counting
over and over the moneys of
a stale achievement. Three
small lavender imploring tips
below and above them two
slender colored arrows
of disdain with anthers
between them and
at the edge of the goblet
a white lip, to drink from--!
And summer lifts her look
forty times over, forty times
over--namelessly.
Beauty
by Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)
Say not of Beauty she is good,
Or aught but beautiful,
Or sleek to doves' wings of the wood
Her wild wings of a gull.
Call her not wicked; that word's touch
Consumes her like a curse;
But love her not too much, too much,
For that is even worse.
O she is neither good nor bad,
But innocent and wild!
Enshrine her and she dies, who had
The hard heart of a child.
"The act of making poetry is an act of hope."
--Natasha Tretheway (1966- )
--Natasha Tretheway (1966- )