Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” and “I felt a Funeral in my Brain” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
Robert Frost, “The Draft Horse” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1951, 1962 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved.
Seamus Heaney, “The Skunk,” from Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Donald Justice, “Epilogue: Coronado Beach, California,” from Collected Poems, copyright © 2004 by Donald Justice. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Also by courtesy of Carcanet Press, publishers of Collected Poems in the United Kingdom.
Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour,” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Richard Wilbur, “The Ride,” from Collected Poems, 1943–2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “One day in Paradise,” reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.