We find out first poet in a pickle of a dire predicament, because he is a pounded-upon, beaten-down, intensely hairy, foul-smelling troglodyte almost totally bereft of language.  What's worse, he's trying to attract a mate, and all the other male troglodytes are far hairier and fouler-smelling than he. They have all the advantage!  What is our despised, wordless, nameless poet to do?  The object of his affection, known to him as Grunt, ignores him because her other suitors supply her with great dripping hunks of raw mastodon haunch, while he has only a few albino termites to proffer. His cause seems hopeless . . .

Until, one night, staring up miserably at the stars winking knowingly overhead, he has a sudden revelation.  The stars glitter like crystals he has seen littering certain tracts of stony ground nearby.  Risking life and stubby limb, he dashes past a few catnapping sabertooths to scoop up as much of the glittery quartz as he can manage to carry and not be eaten alive.  Hands full of iridescent  symbols of his adoring longing, he rushes back, finds Grunt, and proceeds to dump out his treasure before her.

Tentatively, she picks up a crystal and licks it.  Nope, it's not salt, although if it had been salt it would have been an impressive gift.  She grunts, fidgets, frowns, quickly loses interest, then starts looking for something more edible, settling on a juicy anteater carcass brought to her by a suitor she thinks of admiringly as Belch.

Our ignominious poet, so nondescript to her that she hasn't even assigned him a sound-name, is now absolutely despondent.  If he can't communicate his idea to her, his cause is lost.  There'll be no tiny male troglodyte to replicate his genes (which means that for us there will be no poetry).  Forlornly, he moons up at the stars, then, overtaken by wonder and awe, begins suddenly to mouth new, strange, never-before-heard sounds: ah, ah!, stars!  Excitedly, he points up at the night's brilliant panorama of stars, then to the crystals at Grunt's feet, haired like a beaver's pelt and decidedly more fulsome. Stars!  Stars!

She looks blankly at him for a moment, then she gets it. Shrimp bring Grunt stars?  In humankind's first moment of tenderness not attributable to the procurement of foodstuffs, she has bequeathed upon him her sound-name for the delicatest of all delicacies she knows.

More importantly (not to humanity in general, but merely to those oddest of all odd creatures: poets), Shrimp and Grunt have made the great simultaneous leap to sounds, words, metaphor, artistic imagination, and the communication and transference of emotion.  This delightful mélange, I call Romanticism, especially when the emotion conveyed is somehow exaggerated in the process.  Romanticism is, by my definition, primarily amplification of emotion.  Now that statement will no doubt make many Formalist poets I know (and several that I have published) wince.  Aren't we talking about, shudder, overstatement?  Yes, we are.  I will attempt to illustrate that the best poets do indeed engage in emotional hyperbole, in extravagance, in overstatement.

It is my contention that the best poets do pretty much what Shrimp did so many millennia ago:  they impress the people they want to impress--then potential mates, now primarily readers--by transferring and amplifying emotion through words and their sounds, denotations, connotations and metaphorical implications.  We moderns are so jaded to language that we forget the "ah!" in "stars," the sound of laughter in "laughter," the sinister hiss of danger in "hiss."  But the best poets don't forget these things, nor do they take them for granted.  Instead, the best poets use every weapon in the poetic arsenal of incendiary devices to create and transfer emotion, and Romanticism ranks high among such incendiaries.  Poems are crafted of words as buildings are built of stone, but it is a Romantic impulse that causes a Christopher Wren to imagine St. Paul's Cathedral rather than a stone hovel.  And it is a Romantic impulse that causes our friend Shrimp to imagine he can give Grunt the stars, and that makes Milton believe he can "justify the ways of God to man" as an excuse to give the world "Paradise Lost."

Let's look for an example of Romanticism, of poetic overstatement, from the unlikeliest of sources--that (we are told) most pragmatic of poets, Robert Frost:

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.

If we look at the last line above with a stern eye, we might quibble over the word "saddest."  What on earth is Frost, such a famously exact poet, doing here?  Is the lane sad, as in human sadness?  That would be personification, and surely personification is bad.  All the workshops agree on that; how can we doubt them, since they produce so many great poets? Is the lane sad, as in a state of disrepair?  Surely, that's it.  But is the lane, literally, in the saddest state of disrepair of all the city lanes ribboning the globe?  Did Frost check them all out before penning this line?  If not, it seems that he's engaging in overstatement, albeit overstatement employed so subtly it seems almost understatement, or an afterthought.  But wasn't Frost too deliberate, too careful a poet for "saddest" to be an afterthought?  If the word isn't important, he could easily have found a word less sympathy-inducing.  Asking a word to carry more sentiment than it can bear within the edifice of a poem makes the poet a sentimentalist, and Frost was no sentimentalist.  If we read the remainder, and what a remainder it is!, of "Acquainted With the Night," we see that Frost's speaker may be reflecting his considerable inner darkness outward.  The luminary clock proclaims the time is "neither wrong nor right" because the rising sun does not diminish the speaker's inner darkness, which exists independently of the cycle of day and night.  His darkness colors everything he sees, and this makes the city lane, at this particular time, the "saddest."  With "saddest," Frost gives us an early, almost subliminal, clue that the speaker is not "normal," nor is the night, nor the time, nor anything to do with the speaker "normal." In fact, the speaker's depression is presented as something alien, outside time, entirely unaffected by even the brightest of the celestial orbs by which men mark time:  the sun and the moon (the luminary clock "at an unearthly height" may be the moon, unless Frost is also exaggerating the height of a more plebian clock).  When we look at the poem as a complete structure, as an edifice, the use of "saddest" seems somehow perfect.  The lane may well be in a sad state of disrepair.  It may also be seen through the speaker's eyes with the dark coloration of his own despondency.  But why did Frost use "saddest" rather than "sad" or "dilapidated?"  I think it is because he wants the reader to feel the unusualness, the alienness, of the speaker's despair.  He has simultaneously taken that despair to new heights and to new depths.  If we assume for a moment that the speaker is Frost himself, which is quite possible in light of what we know about the man's life, is it possible that Frost has engaged in overstatement?  Has he told us that on this darkest of nights (despite the city lights and the luminary clock or moon), his despair is somehow darker than ours or anyone else's?  If so, how can he know that, having only the ability to feel his own despair? Or, like Shrimp bringing Grunt the very stars, isn't he simply conveying intensified emotion by any means possible?

Here's another example, from by Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Music When Soft Voices Die (To --)":

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

The idea that love will "slumber on" the thought of a deceased lover, as a corpse rests on a bed of heaped rose leaves, is surely wildly extravagant, perhaps even a bit (or more than a bit) silly. Here is an example of poetic nonsense.  Or is it?  Rose leaves wilt quickly.  Does the poet imply that any thoughts of the beloved will be intense for only a moment, then rapidly shrivel to almost nothing?  There is ambiguity also in "thy thoughts."  Does Shelly mean that love will "slumber on" the living lover's thoughts of his departed lover, or in the afterlife "thoughts" (such as they may be) of the dead lover, or simultaneously in both? The living think of the dead, do the dead think of the living?  As the living slowly forget the dead, does the reverse hold true?  Does "slumber on" mean to rest peacefully, or to doze on in a long, Rip-Van-Winkle-ish sort of unwaking forgetfulness?  These four lines are full of ambiguities and possibilities that go far beyond what might seem at first a nicely-worded but sophomoric poeticism.  And we haven't even discussed the sounds of these lines, which are dreamlike, full of soft vowels and consonants.  Here we have four perfect lines, all the better because they are full of Romantic sentiment and intrigue.

Let me now move beyond my clumsy attempts to apply a stethoscope to the Romantic (im)pulse, and get on to the poems . . .

The poems below spotlight the work of the great Romantic poets and their literary descendents.  Here, you will find not only the work of William Wordsworth and William Blake, heirs and usurpers of  Milton, but also the work of poets they influenced, including my personal favorite, Robert Frost.  Frost is not generally considered a Romantic poet, but he did acknowledge his debt to Wordsworth's sonnets and blank verse, and he also wrote darkly romantic poems like the chilling "Acquainted With The Night" and the even more chilling and disturbing "Directive." Auden called Milton "the first eccentric English poet," which seems wrong if one reads Chaucer, Wyatt, Skelton, Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare and other early English poets, but there does seem to be a spark of highly individualistic eccentricity/electricity that runs, however indirectly, from Milton through the personal mythology and visions of  Blake and the visionary sonnets of Wordsworth, to leap, as though through a live sparking wire, into the work of any number of modern poets (including Allen Ginsberg, who heard the "apparitional voice" of Blake just after mast... well, that's probably too much information).  Walter Savage Landor saw Milton's work as a stone arch compared to the ephemeral rainbows of other poets, and one can easily find the same sort of contrast today by comparing the bedrock work of Frost to the often giddy vapors of supposedly "major" poets like John Ashbery.

So the Romantic tradition is very much alive today, not in what the world incorrectly perceives as Harlequin-Romance-like compressed novellas, or Maya Angelou Hallmark cards, but as something more profound and structural, underpinning as it does the work of many of the best Modern poets.  Although some of the early Modernists professed to write in opposition to the "excesses" of the Romantics, one of the best modern literary critics, Randall Jarrell, suggested that Modernism is primarily an extension of Romanticism (an often excessive, messy extension at that), and reading the work of poets like Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Charles Olsen and others ... well, it makes it hard for this perplexed reader to see things otherwise (although in my case it may be "otherdumb.")

Here you will find the stark moral beauty of the work of Blake, who could range from a lullaby like "Cradle Song" to the opposite end of the poetic spectrum in poems like "The Garden,"  "London" and "The Sick Rose."  Blake's range was from advocate of the most innocent to decrier of the most base, and his art was that his best poems will remain vital and relevant even when future readers have no clue what "Satanic mills," chimneysweeps and (hopefully) child labor were.

You will also find the incredible anonymous ballad "Tom O'Bedlam" alongside the work of talented and, yes!, sometimes excessive poets like Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas.  I say that "yes!" with relish, finding the dense, sometimes impenetrable, lyrics of Crane and Thomas infinitely more enjoyable to read than the tedious studies in "verbal reticence"  of theoretically romantic poets like A. R. Ammons, and my use of the lower case "r" here is not a slip.  But I have to admit, a bit forlornly, that I especially like the work of poets like Crane and Thomas when I can understand it.  And that's why I like Robert Frost so much--because his poetry reaches me at so many different levels:  intellectually, emotionally, experientially, in terms of what I think of as "communion," and in a few other ways I haven't quite figured out yet.  I recently had an interesting conversation with Richard Moore in which we discussed the work of Dylan Thomas and I theorized that in his later poems like "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," "In My Craft Or Sullen Art," "Fern Hill" and "A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London," Thomas show signs of moving toward a more accessible style of writing before his untimely death at the age of 39.  And perhaps Thomas is a sextant for poets today:  modern poetry needs a guidance system of sorts away from the foggy shoals and wild undercurrents of bizarre obscurity.  Perhaps the only reader the ultramodern poet truly cares about is himself, but then: why waste so many valuable trees and such vast pots of ink? Hopefully, poets and readers who find things to like and share here will find rich and fertile common ground for the future, which is always only a nanosecond away. -- MRB

"My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold" by William Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
   A rainbow in the sky:          
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
   Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety. 

"The Sick Rose" by William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

"Music When Soft Voices Die (To --)" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory--
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Tom O' Bedlam's Song (Anonymous Ballad, circa 1620)

From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
The spirit that stands by the naked man
In the Book of Moons, defend ye.
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken,
Nor wander from your selves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon,
    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

Of thirty bare years have I
Twice twenty been enragèd,
And of forty been three times fifteen
In durance soundly cagèd.
On the lordly lofts of Bedlam
With stubble soft and dainty,
Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips, ding-dong,
With wholesome hunger plenty,
    And now I sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

With a thought I took for Maudlin,
And a cruse of cockle pottage,
With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all,
I befell into this dotage.
I slept not since the Conquest,
Till then I never wakèd,
Till the roguish boy of love where I lay
Me found and stript me nakèd.
    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

When I short have shorn my sow's face
And swigged my horny barrel,
In an oaken inn, I pound my skin
As a suit of gilt apparel;
The moon's my constant mistress,
And the lovely owl my marrow;
The flaming drake and the night crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The palsy plagues my pulses
When I prig your pigs or pullen
Your culvers take, or matchless make
Your Chanticleer or Sullen.
When I want provant, with Humphry
I sup, and when benighted,
I repose in Paul's with waking souls,
Yet never am affrighted.
    But I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.
 
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
The moon embrace her shepherd,
And the Queen of Love her warrior,
While the first doth horn the star of morn,
And the next the heavenly Farrier.
    While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The Gypsies, Snap and Pedro,
Are none of Tom's comradoes,
The punk I scorn, and the cutpurse sworn
And the roaring boy's bravadoes.
The meek, the white, the gentle,
Me handle not nor spare not;
But those that cross Tom Rynosseross
Do what the panther dare not.
    Although I sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

With an host of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.
    Yet I will sing, Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing;
    Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

"It Is A Beauteous Evening, Calm And Free" by William Wordsworth

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder--everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

"Acquainted With The Night" by Robert Frost

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.

"Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Cradle Song" by William Blake

Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night;
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.

As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.

O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.

"Aplolgia Pro Vita Sua" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size--
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
      His gifted ken can see
      Phantoms of sublimity.

"Sonnet 147" by William Shakespeare

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed,
       For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
       Who art as black as Hell, as dark as night.

"To the Moon" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,--
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas

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.

"Lullaby" by W. H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away 
Individual beauty from 
Thoughtful children, and the grave 
Proves the child ephemeral: 
But in my arms till break of day 
Let the living creature lie, 
Mortal, guilty, but to me 
The entirely beautiful. 

Soul and body have no bounds: 
To lovers as they lie upon 
Her tolerant enchanted slope 
In their ordinary swoon, 
Grave the vision Venus sends 
Of supernatural sympathy, 
Universal love and hope; 
While an abstract insight wakes 
Among the glaciers and the rocks 
The hermit's carnal ecstacy.

Certainty, fidelity 
On the stroke of midnight pass 
Like vibrations of a bell 
And fashionable madmen raise 
Their pedantic boring cry: 
Every farthing of the cost. 
All the dreaded cards foretell. 
Shall be paid, but from this night 
Not a whisper, not a thought. 
Not a kiss nor look be lost. 

Beauty, midnight, vision dies: 
Let the winds of dawn that blow 
Softly round your dreaming head 
Such a day of welcome show 
Eye and knocking heart may bless, 
Find our mortal world enough; 
Noons of dryness find you fed 
By the involuntary powers, 
Nights of insult let you pass 
Watched by every human love.

"Song For The Last Act" by Louise Bogan

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden.  There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence.  In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift.  The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

"London" by William Blake

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

"In My Craft Or Sullen Art" by Dylan Thomas 

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

"Directive" by Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

"Time, Real And Imaginary" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On the wide level of a mountain's head,
(I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place)
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails out-spread,
Two lovely children run an endless race,
               A sister and a brother!
          This far outstripp'd the other;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind:
                 For he, alas! is blind!
O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
And knows not whether he be first or last.

"Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" by William Wordsworth

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

"How many bards gild the lapses of time!" by John Keats

How many bards gild the lapses of time!
A few of them have ever been the food
Of my delighted fancy,--I could brood
Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime:
And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude:
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; ’tis a pleasing chime.
So the unnumber’d sounds that evening store;
The songs of birds--the whisp’ring of the leaves--
The voice of waters--the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound,--and thousand others more
That distance of recognizance bereaves,
Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.

(Our thanks to Esther Cameron for suggesting the inclusion of this poem.) 

"The Fitful Alternations Of The Rain" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.

"A Red, Red Rose" by Robert Burns

Oh my luve is like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
Oh my luve is like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

"The Garden Of Love" by William Blake

I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

"The World Is Too Much With Us" by William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

"Afton Water" by Robert Burns

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
Thou stock-dove, whose echo resounds thro' the glen,
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear,
I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair.
How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,
Far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills;
There daily I wander as noon rises high,
My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye.
How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;
There oft, as mild Ev'ning sweeps over the lea,
The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me.
Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,
And winds by the cot where my Mary resides,
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave,
As gathering sweet flowrets she stems thy clear wave.
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

"Jerusalem" by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

"A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal" by William Wordsworth  

A slumber did my spirit seal;
    I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
    The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
    She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
    With rocks, and stones, and trees.

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

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 angers 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? (Our thanks to Emery Campbell for suggesting the inclusion of this poem.)

"The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens  

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

"When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" by William Butler Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

"The Balloon Of The Mind" by William Butler Yeats

Hands, do what you're bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

"A Noiseless Patient Spider" by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
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.

"When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman

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 heard 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.

"In A Station Of The Metro" by Ezra Pound

The apparition  of these faces  in the crowd:
Petals  on a wet, black  bough .

"To Brooklyn Bridge" by Hart Crane

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty— Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day ... I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen; And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn ...
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still. And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,— Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ... O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

"Exile" by Hart Crane 

My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands,--
No,--nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell', 
And with the day, distance again expands 
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell. 

Yet love endures, though starving and alone. 
A dove's wings cling about my heart each night 
With surging gentleness, and the blue stone 
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

"Dying Speech Of An Old Philosopher" by Walter Savage Landor

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
     Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm'd both hands before the fire of Life;
     It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

"Luke Havergal" by Edward Arlington Robinson

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen, she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal--
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that's in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies--
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this--
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall,
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,--
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal--
Luke Havergal.

"On My First Son" by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much."

"I Knew A Woman" by Theodore Roethke

 I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

"Cirque d'Hiver" by Elizabeth Bishop 

Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back.
A little circus horse with real white hair.
His eyes are glossy black.
He bears a little dancer on his back.

She stands upon her toes and turns and turns.
A slanting spray of artificial roses
is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.
Above her head she poses
another spray of artificial roses.

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.
He has a formal, melancholy soul.
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.
He is the more intelligent by far.
Facing each other rather desperately--
his eye is like a star--
we stare and say, "Well, we have come this far."

"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop

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.

"The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go. 

"The Armadillo" by Elizabeth Bishop

for Robert Lowell

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars --
planets, that is -- the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! -- a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

"On Fame" by John Keats

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsey,--will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsey is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

"When I have fears that I may cease to be" by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

"Roman Fountain" by Louise Bogan

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall. Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air. O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain's bowl
After the air of summer.

"The Fountain Of Blood" by Charles Baudelaire (translated by Rachel Hadas)

A fountain's pulsing sobs--like this my blood
Measures its flowing, so it sometimes seems.
I hear a gentle murmur as it streams;
Where the wound lies I've never understood.

Like water meadows, boulevards are flooded.
Cobblestones, crisscrossed by scarlet rills,
Are islands; creatures come and drink their fill.
Nothing in nature now remains unblooded.

I used to hope that wine could bring me ease,
Could lull asleep my deeply gnawing mind.
I was a fool: the senses clear with wine.

I looked to Love to cure my old disease.
Love led me to a thicket of IVs
Where bristling needles thirsted for each vein.

"Piano" by D. H. Lawrence  

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato.  The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

"Hope Is A Thing With Feathers" by Emily Dickinson

Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings a tune without 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 keeps so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet, never, in extremity
It ask a crumb of me. 

"in Just-" by E. E. Cummings

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles      far      and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far      and      wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and

      the
                goat-footed

 baloonMan      whistles
far
and
wee

"the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls" by E. E. Cummings

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things--
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps.  While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

"The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
     When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
     The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
     Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
     Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be
     The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
     The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
     Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
     Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among
     The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
     Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
     In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
     Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings
     Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
     Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
     His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
     And I was unaware.

"The Convergence Of The Twain" by Thomas Hardy
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

             In a solitude of the sea
             Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
             Steel chambers, late the pyres
             Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
             Over the mirrors meant
             To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
            Jewels in joy designed
           To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
            Dim moon-eyed fishes near
           Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...
            Well: while was fashioning
           This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
           Prepared a sinister mate
           For her--so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
           And as the smart ship grew
           In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
           Alien they seemed to be;
           No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
           Or sign that they were bent
           By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
            Till the Spinner of the Years
           Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

(Our thanks to Richard Moore for suggesting the inclusion of this poem.)

"The Garden" by Ezra Pound

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
               of a sort of emotional anemia. And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
              will commit that indiscretion.

"Beginning My Studies" by Walt Whitman

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

"Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!---An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Editor's Note: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is from Horace's Odes and means: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

"Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchohare longam" by Ernest Dowson
"The brevity of life forbids us to entertain hopes of long duration" --Horace

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

"A Last Word" by Ernest Dowson

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.
Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

"Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae" by Ernest Dowson
"I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynara"--Horace

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

"Here Dead Lie We Because We Did Not Choose" by A. E. Housman

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

"Song of Solomon" (attributed to King Solomon)

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. 
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. 
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. 
I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. 
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. 
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. 
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me. 
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes,
and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor wake my love, till he please. 

The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. 
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall,
he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice. 
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. 
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; 
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, 
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; 
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. 

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, 
let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. 
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. 

My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. 
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved,
and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

"The Mill" by Edward Arlington Robinson

The miller's wife had waited long,
The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
And there might yet be nothing wrong
In how he went and what he said:
"There are no millers any more,"
Was all that she had heard him say;
And he had lingered at the door
So long it seemed like yesterday.
Sick with a fear that had no form
She knew that she was there at last;
And in the mill there was a warm
And mealy fragrance of the past.
What else there was would only seem
To say again what he had meant;
And what was hanging from a beam
Would not have heeded where she went.
And if she thought it followed her,
She may have reasoned in the dark
That one way of the few there were
Would hide her and would leave no mark:
Black water, smooth above the weir
Like starry velvet in the night,
Though ruffled once, would soon appear
The same as ever to the sight.

"Anthem For Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

"The Send-Off" by Wilfred Owen

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

"To Celia" by Ben Jonson

Drink to me, only, with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee,
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st back to me:
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.

"The Bustle In A House" by Emily Dickinson

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth.

The sweeping up the heart
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.

"Forgetfulness" by Hart Crane

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

"Interior" by Hart Crane

It sheds a shy solemnity,
This lamp in our poor room.
O grey and gold amenity, --
Silence and gentle gloom!

Wide from the world, a stolen hour
We claim, and none may know
How love blooms like a tardy flower
Here in the day's after-glow.

And even should the world break in
With jealous threat and guile,
The world, at last, must bow and win
Our pity and a smile.

"The Dark-Eyed Gentleman" by Thomas Hardy

I
I pitched my day's leazings in Crimmercrock Lane,
To tie up my garter and jog on again,
When a dear dark-eyed gentleman passed there and said,
in a way that made all o' me colour rose red,
          'What do I see
          O pretty knee!'
And he came and he tied up my garter for me.

II
'Twixt sunset and moonrise it was, I can mind:
Ah, 'tis easy to lose what we nevermore find!--
of the dear stranger's home, of his name, I knew nought,
But I soon knew his nature and all that it brought.
          Then bitterly
          Sobbed I that he
Should ever have tied up my garter for me!

III
Yet now I've beside me a fine lissom lad,
And my slip's nigh forgot, and my days are not sad;
My own dearest joy is he, comrade, and friend,
he it is who safe-guards me, on him I depend;
          No sorrow brings he,
         And thankful I be
That his daddy once tied up my garter for me!

Note: "Leazings" means a bundle of gleaned corn. [Hardy's note]
(Our thanks to Richard Moore for suggesting the inclusion of this poem.)

"The Tyger" by William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! 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, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & 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 water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

"When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A. E. Housman

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

"To Helen" by Edgar Allan Poe

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

"To Daffodils" by Robert Herrick

Fair daffodils, we weep to see
    You haste away so soon.
As yet the early-rising sun
    Hath not attained his noon.
        Stay, stay,
    Until the hasting day
        Has run
    But to the even-song;
And, having prayed together, we
    Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you;
    We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
    As you, or any thing.
        We die.
    As your hours do, and dry
        Away
    Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew
    Ne'er to be found again.

(Our thanks to Gail White for suggesting the inclusion of this poem.)

"Go, Lovely Rose" by Edmund Waller Go, lovely Rose,--

Tell her that wastes her time and me,
     That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee, 
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

     Tell her that's young, 
And shuns to have her graces spied, 
     That hadst thou sprung 
In deserts where no men abide, 
Thou must have uncommended died. 

     Small is the worth 
Of beauty from the light retir'd: 
     Bid her come forth, 
Suffer herself to be desir'd, 
And not blush so to be admir'd. 

     Then die, that she 
The common fate of all things rare 
     May read in thee; 
How small a part of time they share, 
That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

(Our thanks to Gail White for suggesting the inclusion of this poem.)

"The Kraken" by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep, 
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, 
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep 
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee 
About his shadowy sides; above him swell 
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; 
And far away into the sickly light, 
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell 
Unnumbered and enormous polypi 
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. 
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie 
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep, 
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; 
Then once by man and angels to be seen, 
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

"No Second Troy" by William Butler Yeats 

Why should I blame her that she filled my days 
With misery, or that she would of late 
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, 
Or hurled the little streets upon the great, 
Had they but courage equal to desire? 
What could have made her peaceful with a mind 
That nobleness made simple as a fire, 
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind 
That is not natural in an age like this, 
Being high and solitary and most stern? 
Why, what could she have done, being what she is? 
Was there another Troy for her to burn?  

"Upon Julia's Clothes" by Robert Herrick

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes. 

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
Oh, how that glittering taketh me!

"Is My Team Plowing" by A. E. Housman

"Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?"

Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.

"Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?"

Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.

"Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?"

Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep,
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.

"Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?"

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.

"Credo" by Edward Arlington Robinson

I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
And angel fingers wove, and unaware,
Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.

No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,
For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all--above, beyond it all--
I know the far sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the light.

"High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of--wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.  Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew,
And while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

(Our thanks to Emery Campbell for suggesting the inclusion of this poem.)

"Mariana" by Lord Alfred Tennyson  

 ‘Mariana in the moated grange.’ -- Measure for Measure.  

With blackest moss the flower-plots
   Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
   That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:
   Unlifted was the clinking latch;
   Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
     She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
       He cometh not,’ she said;
     She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
       I would that I were dead!’ 

Her tears fell with the dews at even;
   Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
   Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
   When thickest dark did trance the sky,
   She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
     She only said, ‘The night is dreary,
       He cometh not,’ she said;
     She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
       I would that I were dead!’

Upon the middle of the night,
   Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
   From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
   In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
   Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
     She only said, ‘The day is dreary,
       He cometh not,’ she said;
     She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
       I would that I were dead!’ 

About a stone-cast from the wall
   A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
   The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
   All silver-green with gnarled bark:
   For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
     She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
       He cometh not,’ she said;
     She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
       I would that I were dead!’ 

And ever when the moon was low,
   And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
   She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low,
   And wild winds bound within their cell,
   The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
     She only said, ‘The night is dreary,
       He cometh not,’ she said;
     She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
       I would that I were dead!’ 

All day within the dreamy house,
   The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
   Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,
Or from the crevice peer’d about.
   Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors,
   Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
     She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
       He cometh not,’ she said;
     She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
       I would that I were dead!’ 

The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,
   The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
   The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
   When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
   Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
     Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary,
       He will not come,’ she said;
     She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
       Oh God, that I were dead!’

"Ulysses" by Lord Alfred Tennyson 

It little profits that an idle king, 
By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole 
Unequal laws unto a savage race, 
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink 
Life to the lees.  All times I have enjoyed 
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those 
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when 
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
Vext the dim sea.  I am become a name; 
For always roaming with a hungry heart.
Much have I seen and known--cities of men 
And manners, climates, councils, governments, 
Myself not least, but honored of them all,-- 
And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 
I am a part of all that I have met; 
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough 
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades 
For ever and for ever when I move. 
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! 
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life 
Were all too little, and of one to me 
Little remains; but every hour is saved 
From that eternal silence, something more, 
A bringer of new things; and vile it were 
For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 
And this gray spirit yearning in desire 
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 
     This is my son, mine own Telemachus, 
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle, 
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill 
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild 
A rugged people, and through soft degrees 
Subdue them to the useful and the good. 
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere 
Of common duties, decent not to fail 
In offices of tenderness, and pay 
Meet adoration to my household gods, 
When I am gone.  He works his work, I mine. 
     There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; 
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me, 
That ever with a frolic welcome took 
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 
Free hearts, free foreheads--you and I are old; 
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. 
Death closes all; but something ere the end, 
Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. 
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; 
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep 
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 
Though much is taken, much abides; and though 
We are not now that strength which in old days 
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

"Sonnet--To Science" by Edgar Allan Poe

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door--
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;--
This it is, and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door;--
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"--
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore--
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
'Tis the wind and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door--
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door--
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore--
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door--
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered--not a feather then he fluttered--
Till I scarcely more than muttered, "other friends have flown before--
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore--
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never--nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore--
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite--respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!--
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--
On this home by horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore--
Is there--is there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil--prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore--
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore--
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend," I shrieked, upstarting--
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted--nevermore.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Lord Alfred Tennyson