William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
LEDA AND THE SWAN
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 where 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?
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
The Wild Swans At Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Morning at the Window
1They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
2And along the trampled edges of the street
3I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
4Sprouting despondently at area gates.
5The brown waves of fog toss up to me
6Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
7And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
8An aimless smile that hovers in the air
9And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Hysteria
1As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
2in her laughter and being part of it, until her
3teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
4for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
5inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
6in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
7the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
8with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
9a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
10green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
11gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
12if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
13tea in the garden ..." I decided that if the
14shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
15the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
16and I concentrated my attention with careful
17subtlety to this end.
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot (1925)
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)
The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter
1While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
2I played about the front gate, pulling flowers
3You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
4You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums
5And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
6Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
7At fourteen I married My Lord you.
8I never laughed, being bashful.
9Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
10Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
11At fifteen I stopped scowling,
12I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
13Forever and forever, and forever.
14Why should I climb the look out?
15At sixteen you departed,
16You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
17And you have been gone five months.
18The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
19You dragged your feet when you went out.
20By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
21Too deep to clear them away!
22The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
23The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
24Over the grass in the West garden,
25They hurt me.
26I grow older,
27If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
28Please let me know beforehand,
29And I will come out to meet you,
30As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
By Rihaku.
Notes
1] Translated from Li Po, the Chinese poet (701-62). A secondversion appears as "105. Two Letters from Chang-Kan -- I (A river-merchant's wife writes)" in The Works of Li-Po, trans. Shigeyoshi Obata (London: J. M. Dent, 1923): 151-52 (PL 2671 A1 1923 Robarts Library). For other translations, see Kai-chee Wong, Pung Ho, and Shu-leung Dang, A Research Guide to English Translation of Chinese Verse (Chinese University Press, 1977), p. 59, no. 897.
5] A suburb of Nanking.
30] "The Long Wind Beach, of Chang-feng Sha, is in Anhwei, several hundred miles up the river, from Nanking. It is really a long way. But by making the wife say that the way is not long, Li Po brings out the girlishness of the speaker" (The Works of Li-Po, p. 152). Pound uses the Japanese form of the place name.
Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)
In a Station of the Metro
1The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
2Petals on a wet, black bough .
Notes
1] the metro: the Paris subway system.
See Pound's commentary on this poem in his article "Vorticism," The Fortnightly Review 571 (Sept. 1, 1914): 465-67 (AP 4 F7 Robarts Library):
"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation ... not in speech, but in little spotches of colour. It was just that -- a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.
"That evening, in the Rue Raynouard, I realised quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion, or even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting, of "non-representative" painting, a painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour.
....
"That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone into paint ...
"The 'one image poem' is a form of super-position, that is to say it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work 'of second intensity.' Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --
'The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.'
"I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.
"This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention."
See also a republication of this essay in Pound's Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; London: New Directions, 1960): 86-89).
The lines have no spaced words in 1916.
Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)
And the days are not full enough
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)
The Garden
En robe de parade.
Samain.
1Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
2She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
3And she is dying piece-meal
4 of a sort of emotional anemia.
5And round about there is a rabble
6Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
7They shall inherit the earth.
8In her is the end of breeding.
9Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
10She would like some one to speak to her,
11And is almost afraid that I
12will commit that indiscretion.
Notes
1] The verse preface to Au Jardin de l'Infante (1893) by Albert Samain (1858-1900) opens, "Mon âme est une infante en robe de parade."
skein: loosely coiled length.
2] Kensingston Gardens: 275 acres of fashionable park in the West End, including flowers, the Palace Gardens, the Albert Memorial, and statues of Queen Victoria, William III, and Peter Pan.
4] anemia: "anæmia" in 1916.
7] Matthew 5.5: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (from Jesus' sermon on the mount).
10] This line does not begin a verse paragraph in 1916.
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle; 1886-1961)
Helen
1All Greece hates
2the still eyes in the white face,
3the lustre as of olives
4where she stands,
5and the white hands.
6All Greece reviles
7the wan face when she smiles,
8hating it deeper still
9when it grows wan and white,
10remembering past enchantments
11and past ills.
12Greece sees unmoved,
13God's daughter, born of love,
14the beauty of cool feet
15and slenderest knees,
16could love indeed the maid,
17only if she were laid,
18white ash amid funereal cypresses.
1] Helen: daughter of Leda and Zeus, wife to Menelaus. Her abduction by Paris, one of the sons of Priam, king of Troy, led to the seven-years' war with the Greeks led by Agamemnon.
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle; 1886-1961)
Leda
1Where the slow river
2meets the tide,
3a red swan lifts red wings
4and darker beak,
5and underneath the purple down
6of his soft breast
7uncurls his coral feet.
8Through the deep purple
9of the dying heat
10of sun and mist,
11the level ray of sun-beam
12has caressed
13the lily with dark breast,
14and flecked with richer gold
15its golden crest.
16Where the slow lifting
17of the tide,
18floats into the river
19and slowly drifts
20among the reeds,
21and lifts the yellow flags,
22he floats
23where tide and river meet.
24Ah kingly kiss --
25no more regret
26nor old deep memories
27to mar the bliss;
28where the low sedge is thick,
29the gold day-lily
30outspreads and rests
31beneath soft fluttering
32of red swan wings
33and the warm quivering
34of the red swan's breast.
Notes
1] Leda, whom Zeus saw, the wife of a king of Sparta, naked in the Eurotas river. Zeus took the form of a swan to seduce her, begetting Castor, Pollux, and Helen, the subject of another of H.D.'s lyrics. W. B. Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" depicts the violence of the rapein contrast to what H.D. sees.
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
Buffalo Bill 's
1Buffalo Bill 's
2defunct
3 who used to
4 ride a watersmooth-silver
5 stallion
6and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
7 Jesus
8he was a handsome man
9 and what i want to know is
10how do you like your blueeyed boy
11Mister Death
Notes
1] William F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill"), who died in 1917, became famous for his Wild West Show, which he began in 1883 following his service as a scout in the civil war and during attacks against the Sioux from 1868-1872.
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
1the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
2are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
3(also, with the church's protestant blessings
4daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
5they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
6are invariably interested in so many things--
7at the present writing one still finds
8delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
9perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
10scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
11.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
12Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
13sky lavender and cornerless, the
14moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
5] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Acquainted With The Night
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
1Among twenty snowy mountains,
2The only moving thing
3Was the eye of the black bird.
II
4I was of three minds,
5Like a tree
6In which there are three blackbirds.
III
7The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
8It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
9A man and a woman
10Are one.
11A man and a woman and a blackbird
12Are one.
V
13I do not know which to prefer,
14The beauty of inflections
15Or the beauty of innuendoes,
16The blackbird whistling
17Or just after.
VI
18Icicles filled the long window
19With barbaric glass.
20The shadow of the blackbird
21Crossed it, to and fro.
22The mood
23Traced in the shadow
24An indecipherable cause.
VII
25O thin men of Haddam,
26Why do you imagine golden birds?
27Do you not see how the blackbird
28Walks around the feet
29Of the women about you?
VIII
30I know noble accents
31And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
32But I know, too,
33That the blackbird is involved
34In what I know.
IX
35When the blackbird flew out of sight,
36It marked the edge
37Of one of many circles.
X
38At the sight of blackbirds
39Flying in a green light,
40Even the bawds of euphony
41Would cry out sharply.
XI
42He rode over Connecticut
43In a glass coach.
44Once, a fear pierced him,
45In that he mistook
46The shadow of his equipage
47For blackbirds.
XII
48The river is moving.
49The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
50It was evening all afternoon.
51It was snowing
52And it was going to snow.
53The blackbird sat
54In the cedar-limbs.
Notes
1] In a letter to L. W. Payne, Jr., Stevens patiently explained that the poem dealt with sense experiences or "sensations" (Letters, 251).
25] Haddam: a town in Connecticut whose men may have dug once for gold but whose distinctively "Yankee"-sounding name accounted for its use here (Letters, 251, 786).
40] bawds of euphony: evidently, literary critics, those who make money off other men's enjoyment of harmony (Letters, 340).
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Exclusion
1The soul selects her own society,
2Then shuts the door;
3On her divine majority
4Obtrude no more.
5Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
6At her low gate;
7Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
8Upon her mat.
9I've known her from an ample nation
10Choose one
11Then close the valves of her attention
12Like stone.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Safe in their alabaster chambers
1Safe in their alabaster chambers,
2Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
3Sleep the meek members of the resurrection.
4Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.
5Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
6Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
7Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence,--
8Ah, what sagacity perished here!
9Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
10Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
11Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
12Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.
Notes
1] alabaster: hard, translucent, white mineral like gypsum used for sculpture and vases
2] This line is separated between the words "morning" and "and" into two lines in the existing manuscript version of poem 216 (The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin in two volumes (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981: I, 193; fascicles 10; cf. I, 103, fascicle 6; PS 1541 A1 1981 ROBA).
3] Sleep: the existing manuscript version reads "Lie".
5-8] This stanza is missing in the existing manuscript version.
10] This line is separated into two lines between the words "arcs" and "and" in the existing manuscript version.
11] diadems: crowns
Doges: chief justices in Venice and Genoa
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I felt a funeral in my brain
1I felt a funeral in my brain,
2 And mourners, to and fro,
3Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
4 That sense was breaking through.
5And when they all were seated,
6 A service like a drum
7Kept beating, beating, till I thought
8 My mind was going numb.
9And then I heard them lift a box,
10 And creak across my soul
11With those same boots of lead, again.
12 Then space began to toll
13As all the heavens were a bell,
14 And Being but an ear,
15And I and silence some strange race,
16 Wrecked, solitary, here.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
A little east of Jordan (59)
1A little east of Jordan,
2Evangelists record,
3A gymnast and an angel
4Did wrestle long and hard,
5Till morning touching mountain--
6And Jacob, waxing strong,
7The Angel begged permission
8To breakfast to return.
9"Not so," said cunning Jacob!
10"I will not let thee go
11Except thou bless me"--Stranger!
12The which acceded to,
13Light swung the silver fleeces
14"Peniel" hills beyond,
15And the bewildered gymnast
16Found he had worsted God!
Notes
1] Cf. Genesis 32: 24-31.
24. And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
25. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
26. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
27. And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.
28. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
29. And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.
30. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
31. And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.
13] silver fleeces: the clouds lighted by the rising sun (Genesis 32.31).
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Winter Trees
1All the complicated details
2of the attiring and
3the disattiring are completed!
4A liquid moon
5moves gently among
6the long branches.
7Thus having prepared their buds
8against a sure winter
9the wise trees
10stand sleeping in the cold.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
so much depends
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning [1962]
W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)
Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun s hone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
"Fall of Icarus" by Breughel
Claude McKay (1889-1948)
If We Must Die
1If we must die, let it not be like hogs
2Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
3While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
4Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
5If we must die, O let us nobly die,
6So that our precious blood may not be shed
7In vain; then even the monsters we defy
8Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
9O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
10Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
11And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
12What though before us lies the open grave?
13Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
14Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)
Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)
Morning Song
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
At the Fishhouses
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Marilyn Hacker
From Orient Point
The art of living isn’t hard to muster:
Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.
When someone makes you promises, don’t trust her
unless they’re in the here and now, and just her
willing largesse free-handed to a friend.
The art of living isn’t hard to muster:
groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;
take brisk walks so you’re hungry at the end.
When someone makes you promises, don’t trust her
to know she can afford what they will cost her
to keep until they’re kept. Till then, pretend
the art of living isn’t hard to muster.
Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster
of pleasures. Next time, don’t go round the bend
when someone makes you promises. Don’t trust her
past where you’d trust yourself, and don’t adjust her
words to mean more to you than she’d intend.
The art of living isn’t hard to muster.
You never had her, so you haven’t lost her
like spare house keys. Whatever she opens,
when someone makes you promises, don’t. Trust your
art; go on living: that’s not hard to muster.
Seamus Heaney
From Clearances Sonnet #5
The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
Seamus Heaney
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Seamus Heaney
Blackberry-picking
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
Cathy Song (1955)
Cathy Song grew up with the older Asian culture of her Korean grandmother and the more modern Hawaiian culture of her surroundings. She graduated from Wellesley College and Boston University, and writes poems which typically depict a movement between the two worlds of her upbringing.
Lost Sister
1
In China,
even the peasants
named their first daughters
Jade--
the stone that in the far fields
could moisten the dry season,
could make men move mountains
for the healing green of the inner hills
glistening like slices of winter melon.
And the daughters were grateful:
They never left home.
To move freely was a luxury
stolen from them at birth.
Instead, they gathered patience,
learning to walk in shoes
the size of teacups,
without breaking--
the arc of their movements
as dormant as the rooted willow,
as redundant as the farmyard hens.
But they traveled far
in surviving,
learning to stretch the family rice,
to quiet the demons,
the noisy stomachs.
2
There is a sister
across the ocean,
who relinquished her name,
diluting jade green
with the blue of the Pacific.
Rising with a tide of locusts,
she swarmed with others
to inundate another shore.
In America,
there are many roads
and women can stride along with men.
But in another wilderness,
the possibilities,
the loneliness,
can strangulate like jungle vines.
The meager provisions and sentiments
of once belonging--
fermented roots, Mah-Jong tiles and firecrackers--set but
a flimsy household
in a forest of nightless cities.
A giant snake rattles above,
spewing black clouds into your kitchen.
Dough-faced landlords
slip in and out of your keyholes,
making claims you don't understand,
tapping into your communication systems
of laundry lines and restaurant chains.
You find you need China:
your one fragile identification,
a jade link
handcuffed to your wrist.
You remember your mother
who walked for centuries,
footless--
and like her,
you have left no footprints,
but only because
there is an ocean in between,
the unremitting space of your rebellion.
Adrienne Rich
Delta
If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking though it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter
If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread
Storm Warnings
by Adrienne Rich
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.
To His Importunate Mistress
Peter DeVries (1910-1993)
Had we but world enough, and time,
My coyness, lady, were a crime,
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot, striking fear
The hour is nigh when creditors
Will prove to be my predators.
As wages of our picaresque,
Bag lunches bolted at my desk
Must stand as fealty to you
For each expensive rendezvous.
Obeisance at your marble feet
Deserves the best-appointed suite,
And would have, lacked I not the pelf
To pleasure also thus myself;
But amply sumptuous amorous scenes
Rule out the rake of modest means.
Since mistress presupposes wife,
It means a doubly costly life;
For fools by second passion fired
A second income is required,
The earning which consumes the hours
They'd hoped to spend in rented bowers.
To hostelries the worst of fates
That weekly raise their daily rates!
I gather, lady, from your scoffing
A bloke more solvent in the offing.
So revels thus to rivals go
For want of monetary flow.
How vexing that inconsistent cash
The constant suitor must abash,
Who with excuses vainly pled
Must rue the undishevelled bed,
And that for paltry reasons given
His conscience may remain unriven.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY
Constantly risking absurdity
.....................................and death
whenever he performs
............................above the heads
..........................................of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
.............................climbs on rime
.....................................to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
.........................................above a sea of faces
places his way
.......................to the other side of day
performing entrechats
.........................and sleight-of-foot triks
and other high theatrics
........................and all without mistaking
any thing
............for what it may not be
For he`s the super realist
.....................................who must perforce perceive
taut truth
............before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
..............................toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
..................................with gravity
.......................................to start her death-defying leap
And he
............A little charleychaplin man
.....................................who may or may not catch
her eternal form
.................spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence.
Allen Ginsberg
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Berkeley, 1955
The Waking (1953)
Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Dylan Thomas
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Margaret Atwood (born 1939)
DEATH OF A YOUNG SON BY DROWNING
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.
His feet slid on the bank,
the currents took him;
he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water
and plunged into distant regions,
his head a bathysphere;
through his eyes' thin glass bubbles
he looked out, reckless adventurer
on a landscape stranger than Uranus
we have all been to and some remember.
There was an accident; the air locked,
he was hung in the river like a heart.
They retrieved the swamped body,
cairn of my plans and future charts,
with poles and hooks
from among the nudging logs.
It was spring, the sun kept shining, the new grass
leapt to solidity;
my hands glistened with details.
After the long trip I was tired of waves.
My foot hit rock. The dreamed sails
collapsed, ragged.
I planted him in this country
like a flag.
Linda Pastan
love poem
I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other
Eavan Boland
The Necessity for Irony
On Sundays,
when the rain held off,
after lunch or later,
I would go with my twelve year old
daughter into town,
and put down the time
at junk sales, antique fairs.
There I would
lean over tables,
absorbed by
lace, wooden frames,
glass. My daughter stood
at the other end of the room,
her flame-coloured hair
obvious whenever —
which was not often —
I turned around.
I turned around.
She was gone.
Grown. No longer ready
to come with me, whenever
a dry Sunday
held out its promises
of small histories. Endings.
When I was young
I studied styles: their use
and origin. Which age
was known for which
ornament: and was always drawn
to a lyric speech, a civil tone.
But never thought
I would have the need,
as I do now, for a darker one:
Spirit of irony,
my caustic author
of the past, of memory, —
and of its pain, which returns
hurts, stings — reproach me now,
remind me
that I was in those rooms,
with my child,
with my back turned to her,
searching — oh irony! —
for beautiful things.
Billy Collins
The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
Source: http://www.hopewell.k12.pa.us/Downloads/Modern%20Age%20poetry%20worksheet.doc
Web site to visit: http://www.hopewell.k12.pa.us
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