Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
One by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings –
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body – or flock
mewing where
a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray. You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry. The
whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion. Disguised by what
might seem the opposite, the sea-
side flowers and
trees are favored by the fog so that you have
the tropics at first hand: the trumpet-vine,
fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has
spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds,
or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine
at the back door;
cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort,
striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies –
yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts –
toad-plant,
petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue
ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas.
The climate
is not right for the banyan, frangipani, or
jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent
life. Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit;
but here they’ve cats, not cobras, to
keep down the rats. The diffident
little newt
with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced-
out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that
ambition can buy or take away. The college student
named Ambrose sits on the hillside
with his not-native books and hat
and sees boats
at sea progress white and rigid as if in
a groove. Liking an elegance of which
the source is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique
sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of
interlacing slats, and the pitch
of the church
spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets
down a rope as a spider spins a thread;
he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a
sign says C. J. Poole, Steeple-Jack,
in black and white; and one in red
and white says
Danger. The church portico has four fluted
columns, each a single piece of stone, made
modester by white-wash. This would be a fit haven for
waifs, children, animals, prisoners,
and presidents who have repaid
sin-driven
senators by not thinking about them. The
place has a school-house, a post-office in a
store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted
schooner on
the stocks. The hero, the student,
the steeple-jack, each in his way,
is at home.
It could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger-signs by the church
while he is gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope.
Marianne Moore
I am not sure why I want to tell it
since the cup was not mine and I was not there,
and it may not have been white after all.
When I tell it, though, it is white, and the girl
to whom it has just been given, by her mother,
is eight. She is holding a white cup against her breast,
and her mother has just said goodbye, though those
could not have been, exactly, the words. No one knows
what her father has said, but when I tell it,
he is either helping someone very old with a bag,
a worn valise, held in place with a rope,
or asking a guard for a cigarette. There is, of course,
no cigarette. The cattle cars stand with their doors
slid back. They are black inside, and the girl
who has just been given a cup and told to walk
in a straight line and told to look like she wants
a drink of water, who screamed in the truck
all the way to the station, who knew, at eight,
where she was going, is holding a cup to her breast
and walking away, going nowhere, for water.
She does not turn, but when she has found water,
which she does, in all versions of the story, everywhere,
she takes a small sip of it, and swallows.
Roger Mitchell
He thought he saw an Elephant,
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
‘At length I realise’, he said,
‘The bitterness of Life.’
He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.
‘Unless you leave this house,’ he said,
‘I’ll send for the Police!’
He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
‘The one thing I regret,’ he said,
‘Is that it cannot speak!’
He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
‘If this should stay to dine,’ he said,
‘There won’t be much for us!’
He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee-mill:
He looked again, and found it was
A Vegetable-Pill.
‘Were I to swallow this,’ he said,
‘I should be very ill!’
He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.
‘Poor thing,’ he said, ‘poor silly thing!
It’s waiting to be fed!’
He thought he saw an Albatross
That fluttered round the lamp:
He looked again, and found it was
A Penny-Postage-Stamp.
‘You’d best be getting home,’ he said:
‘The nights are very damp!’
He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
‘And all its mystery,’ he said,
‘Is clear as day to me!’
Lewis Carroll
‘Whom do you love best, puzzling man, tell us: your father, your mother, your sister or your brother?’
‘I have no father, no mother, no sister and no brother.’
‘Your friends?’
‘Now you are using a word whose meaning to this day remains
unknown to me.’
‘Your country?’
‘I do not know in which latitude it lies.’
‘Beauty?’
‘I would willingly love her, were she a goddess and immortal.’
‘Gold?’
‘I hate it as you hate God.’
‘What do you love then, extraordinary stranger?’
‘I love the clouds … the passing clouds … there … there … the wonderful clouds!’
Charles Baudelaire, trans. by Carol Clark
Black grows the southern sky betokening rain
And humming hive-bees homeward hurry by;
They feel the change – so let us shun the grain
And take the broad road while our feet are dry.
Ay, there some dropples moistened in my face
And pattered on my hat – ’tis coming nigh –
Let’s look about and find a sheltering place.
The little things around, like you and I,
Are hurrying through the grass to shun the shower.
Here stoops an ash tree – hark, the wind gets high,
But never mind, this ivy for an hour,
Rain as it may, will keep us dryly here.
That little wren knows well his sheltering bower
Nor leaves his dry house though we come so near.
John Clare
An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lined and shaped like a teacup.
A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you’ll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they’re set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
unhand unbelieving,
that either
a First Cause said once, ‘Let there
be sundews,’ and there were, or they’ve
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.
Amy Clampitt
Endlessly over the water
Birds of the Bann are singing;
Sweeter to me their voices
Than any churchbell’s ringing.
Over the plain of Moyra
Under the heels of foemen
I saw my people broken
As flax is scutched by women.
But the cries I hear by Derry
Are not of men triumphant;
I hear their calls in the evening,
Swans calm and exultant.
Over the valley’s steepness;
No music on the earth
Can move me like its sweetness.
Christ, Christ hear me!
Christ, Christ of thy meekness!
Christ, Christ love me!
Sever me not from thy sweetness!
Anon., trans. by Frank O’Connor
for Gordon Ostler
God and His angels stroll in the garden
before turning in for the night.
They’ve adopted the style
of rich and gifted young Englishmen this evening
and also, bizarrely even for them, decided that they’ll speak
in nothing but Sumerian to each other
which all are agreed was a truly heavenly language.
It isn’t long before God starts boasting,
in Sumerian of course, that He’s the only Being He knows
Who knows by heart The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,
and is about to prove it when Lucifer intercedes
to make the points that
a) they’ve all agreed to speak Sumerian, which was never the
tongue of that estimable poem, and that unless He wants to
pay the usual forfeit, which wouldn’t really be consonant
with His divinity, He’d better give up the idea;
b) should He decide to do it into
instantaneous and perfect Sumerian metres,
a feat of which they’re all aware He’s capable,
He wouldn’t be proving His grasp of the original
and would run the risk of them thinking Him a show-off;
& c) since He, God, and not Arthur Hugh Clough must be regarded
as the only true author of The Bothie, as of all things,
he, Satan, doesn’t see what the point of it would be anyway.
In the silence which follows the Creator is keenly aware
of the voice of the nightingale, then murmurs of consensus,
then much delighted laughter from the angels.
Lucifer bows.
The nightingale stops singing.
God sighs. He could really do without these bitches sometimes
but then where would He be?
As if to answer this question to Himself
He withdraws to the farthest reaches of the garden
and leans on the parapet, smoking in fitful gloom,
for what seems like an eternity.
He lights each gasper from the butt of His last
then flicks the glowing end far into the dark,
displeased at His foreknowledge of where it will fall.
To KNOW what His more intelligent creatures have thought
of these lights that appear in August out of Perseus
and not to have disabused them of it, as He’s always meant to,
is unforgivable. He gazes in their direction in the dark
and gives them His Word that soon He will change all that,
silent at first, then whispered, then shouted in Sumerian.
Peter Didsbury
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you –
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me – we two – you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me – who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records – Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
a part of you, instructor.
You are white –
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me –
although you’re older – and white –
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
Langston Hughes
There is another loneliness
That many die without,
Not want of friend occasions it,
Or circumstance of lot.
But nature sometimes, sometimes thought,
And whoso it befall
Is richer than could be divulged
By mortal numeral.
Emily Dickinson
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
John Berryman
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
Anon.
There was a young man from Dundee
Was stung on the arm by a wasp.
When asked did it hurt
He said ‘No, not really –
It can do it again if it likes.’
Anon.
There was an old man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter, called Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
Pa followed the pair to Pawtucket
(The man and the girl with the bucket),
And he said to the man
‘You’re welcome to Nan!’
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.
Then the pair followed Pa to Manhasset,
Where he still held the cash as an asset;
And Nan and the man
Stole the money and ran,
And as for the bucket, Manhasset.
Anon.
There was an old person of Putney,
Whose food was roast spiders and chutney,
Which he took with his tea, within sight of the sea,
That romantic old person of Putney.
Edward Lear
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better, but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking.
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Small song,
two beat:
the robin on the lawn
hops from sun
into shadow, shadow
into sun.
Robert Hass
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –
I hold it towards you.
John Keats
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?
Robert Hayden
Thule, the period of cosmography,
Doth vaunt of Hecla, whose sulphurious fire
Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky;
Trinacrian Aetna’s flames ascend not higher.
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.
The Andalusian merchant, that returns
Laden with cochineal and China dishes,
Reports in Spain how strangely Fogo burns
Amidst an ocean full of flying fishes.
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.
Thomas Weelkes
And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday –
So much is true.
And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday, – yes – but what
Is that to me?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.
Dad told me I’d to tell them at St James’s
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That ‘eternity’ inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they’d be together, ‘later’.
I signed for the parcelled clothing as the son,
the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress –
the clerk phoned down: 6–8–8–3–1?
Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!
It’s on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!
I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,
sift through its circle slowly, like that thing
you used to let me watch to time the eggs.
Tony Harrison
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
W. B. Yeats
Thee for my recitative,
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day
declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat
convulsive,
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,
shuttling at thy sides,
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the
distance,
Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of
thy wheels,
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the
continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging
lamps at night,
Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,
rousing all,
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding.
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.
Walt Whitman
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
’S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss ’t!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ wast,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
Robert Burns
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too –
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
John Keats
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of – was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.
Robert Frost
Thy praise, or dispraise is to me alike:
One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.
Ben Jonson
Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Love’s Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.
Two hundred to adore each breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state;
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Times wingèd chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie
Desarts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity:
And your quaint honour turn to dust;
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now, therefore, while the youthful glue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
Three thinges there bee that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilest they growe asunder farr,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another marr;
And they bee theise: the wood, the weede, the wagg.
The wood is that, which makes the Gallow tree,
The weed is that, which stringes the Hangmans bagg,
The wagg my pritty knave betokeneth thee.
Marke well deare boy whilest theise assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hempe growes, the wagg is wilde,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rott,
It fretts the halter, and it choakes the childe.
Then bless thee, and beware, and lett us praye,
Wee part not with the at this meeting day.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Well, honest John, how fare you now at home?
The spring is come and birds are building nests
The old cock-robin to the sty is come
With olive feathers and its ruddy breast
And the old cock with wattles and red comb
Struts with the hens and seems to like some best
Then crows and looks about for little crumbs
Swept out by little folks an hour ago
The pigs sleep in the sty the bookman comes
The little boys lets home-close-nesting go
And pockets tops and tawes where daiseys bloom
To look at the new number just laid down
With lots of pictures and good stories too
And Jack the jiant-killer’s high renown
John Clare
Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse
squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
full of satisfaction, in a man’s house?
You clamber towards me on your four corners –
right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
I love you for being a toad,
for crawling like a Japanese wrestler,
and for not being frightened.
I put you in my purse hand, not shutting it,
and set you down outside directly under
every star.
A jewel in your head? Toad,
you’ve put one in mine,
a tiny radiance in a dark place.
Norman MacCaig
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
Frank O’Hara
Tonight I’ve watched
The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down
The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am
in bed alone
Sappho, trans. by
Mary Barnard
Travelling in a comfortable car
Down a rainy road in the country
We saw a ragged fellow at nightfall
Signal to us for a ride, with a low bow.
We had a roof and we had room and we drove on
And we heard me say, in a grumpy voice: no
We can’t take anyone with us.
We had gone on a long way, perhaps a day’s march
When suddenly I was shocked by this voice of mine
This behaviour of mine and this
Whole world.
Bertolt Brecht
– and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees –
Revelation 7: 2
They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches
as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud
common laughs of the men, above it all.
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat
in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now! – )
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have
thought of him again.
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the
whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the
planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the
great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying –
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’
Charlotte Mew
For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Anne Sexton
In a noon-tide of a sumers day –
The sunne shon ful merye that tide –
I took myn hawk al for to play,
My spaniel renning by my side.
A feisant hen soone gan I see
Myn hound put up ful fair to flight;
I sente my faukun, I let him flee:
It was to me a deinteous sight.
My faukun flegh faste to his pray,
I ran tho with a ful glad chere;
I spurnėd ful soone on my way,
My leg was hent al with a brere.
This brere forsoothė dide me greef,
And soone it made me to turne ayé,
For he bare written in every leef
This word in Latin, revertere.
I kneeled and pulled the brere me fro,
And redde this word ful hendėly;
Myn herte fil down unto my to
That was wont sitten ful likingly.
I let myn hawk and feisant fare,
My spaniel fil down to my knee;
Thenne took I me with sighing sare
This new lessòun, revertere.
Revertere is as miche to say
In English tunge as ‘turne ayèn’.
Turne ayèn, man, I thee pray,
And thinke hertily what thou hast ben.
Of thy livinge bethinke thee rife,
In open and in privité;
That thou may come to everlasting life,
Take to thy minde revertere.
Anon.
‘Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Soo–oop of the e–e–evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!
‘Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Soo – oop of the e – e – evening,
Beautiful, beauti – FUL SOUP!
‘Soo – oop of the e – e – evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!’
Lewis Carroll
Says Tweed to Till –
‘What gars ye rin sae still?’
Says Till to Tweed –
‘Though ye rin with speed
And I rin slaw,
For ae man that ye droon
I droon twa.’
Anon.
When Clumsy harks the gladsome ting-a-lings
Of dinner chimes that Mrs Clumsy rings,
His two hands winglike at his most bald head,
Then Clumsy readies Clumsy to be fed.
He pulls from satchel huge a tiny chair,
And waggling his pillowed derrière
He hitches up his pants to gently sit.
Like two ecstatic doves his white hands flit
Tucking his bib in quickly, then, all thumbs,
They brush away imaginary crumbs
From knee-high table with dismissive air.
With fists wrapped round his giant silverware
He shuts his eyes and puckers up for kisses.
In such a pose Clumsy awaits his Mrs,
Rubbing his hungry ribs. But oh, alack,
Quite unbeknownst to Clumsy, at his back
The circle of a second spotlight shows
That No-No has delivered fatal blows
To Mrs Clumsy since that happy time
She summoned Clumsy with her dinner chime.
And there is Clumsy’s darling lying dead.
How like a rubber ball bounces her head
As No-No drags her feet-first from this life.
Then No-No dresses up as Clumsy’s wife,
Her scarf now silhouettes his long hooked nose,
His long bones rattle in her frilly clothes
As No-No brings a tray of cups and plates
Into the light where puckered Clumsy waits.
Hearing her footstep soft makes Clumsy take
The pucker from his lips and sweetly break
Into falsetto greetings, then resume
His lips into a kiss. But this is doom,
And hideously silent No-No stands.
When Clumsy parts his eyelids both his hands
Fly up as if on strings and Clumsy screams,
The tears squirt from his ducts a dozen streams,
His mouth blubbers, inelegantly smeared,
‘Where is she, No-No? Oh, I am afeared!’
Then No-No lifts up Clumsy’s trembly chin,
And leans to hiss with loud stage whisper in
The big pink ear of Clumsy, ‘My dear friend,’
No-No enunciates. ‘This is The End.’
Disguised as Doctor of Philosophy
In academic haberdashery
By dint of hood and black capacious gown,
No-No wipes off the blackboard up and down,
His black sleeve floating outward with each lunge,
The black streaks glisten from his dampened sponge,
While Clumsy sharpens pencils two feet long
To little stubs and wets them with his tongue,
Then smooths his pad of paper with gloved fists.
He lifts his sleeves a fraction at the wrists
And twirls his hands around like windmill sails
To soothe his nerves, then drums his muffled nails
Until the Doctor claps his hands rat-tat
And picks his pointer up and points it at
His eager pupil with the jumbo ears:
‘Compose a paragraph.’ And Clumsy clears
His throat a dozen times to soft aver,
‘I don’t know how to write with letters sir.’
At which the Doctor hides with sleeve a smile
Most uncontrollable and fraught with guile,
Until, authority regained, he says,
‘In that case you may dictate sentences
Which you most wish to write, and I’ll record
Your words for you to copy from the board.’
Now Clumsy tries to think of what to write.
He cranes his neck around stage-left and -right,
He gazes toward the rafters thinking hard
And sometimes shakes his head as to discard
Ideas he finds less than adequate,
Then caroling a joyous ‘I know what!’
He pulls a giant lightbulb from a sack
And holds it overhead and puts it back,
And in his vast excitement both his hands
Pull up his earlobe-anchored rubber bands
To lift from scalp his tiny frizzy wig:
‘I’d like to start with “God is very big”.’
Erupting laughter nearly knocks quite down
The Doctor in his nearly empty gown,
He whirls on heel and cuts his hooting off:
‘My theologian! Fellow philosophe!
Your disquisition has the resonance
Of truth’s unique, unutterable sense
But yet, being pedantic and antique,
This mind of mine must tinker, weigh, and seek,
And wonder if together you and I
For sake of scholarship should specify
How big God is?’ Thus groping for the truth
About the size of God makes pink smoke poof
From Clumsy’s ears in jets, and fire alarms
Go off backstage as, lowered head on arms,
Full sixty seconds Clumsy cogitates.
The Doctor snaps his chalk in two and waits.
Clumsy looks up and No-No utters ‘Yes?’
‘Bigger than the biggest clouds, I guess.’
‘Bigger than clouds! Dear fellow! I should say
I never would have thought of God that way!
Then let’s begin.’ And No-No sets the chalk
Tick-ticking on the board like time-bomb clock
While Clumsy wraps his pencil finger-wise
And sets it on the page and squints his eyes
At No-No’s blackboard words so white and clean
And neat and straight with spaces in between,
And then, his page two inches from his nose,
He copies out in crooked uphill rows:
‘I, Clumsy, hereby give and wittingly
My soul to No-No for Eternity.’
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d 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 enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ 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 honour’d 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 wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ 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 sceptre and the isle –
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred 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 toil’d, 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 honour 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.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
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.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
Seamus Heaney
I have done one braver thing
Than all the Worthies did,
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.
It were but madness now t’impart
The skill of specular stone,
When he which can have learned the art
To cut it, can find none.
So, if I now should utter this,
Others (because no more
Such stuff to work upon, there is,)
Would love but as before.
Hath found, all outward loathes,
For he who colour loves, and skin,
Loves but their oldest clothes.
If, as I have, you also do
Vertue attired in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She;
And if this love, though placed so,
From profane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they do, deride:
Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did;
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.
John Donne
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are – cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves’ goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,
the key is turned. Extend yourself –
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.
Louise Glück
Welcome, dear Wanderer, once more!
Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
Let Thou and I contented dwell!
But say, O whither hast thou rang’d?
Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d:
Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.
Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company, I fear,
When distant from your Parent’s Eye.
Was it for This, O graceless Child!
Was it for This you learn’d to spell?
Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d:
Go drown thyself in yonder Well.
I wonder how thy Time was spent:
No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climb’d the Monument?
Nor seen the Lions, nor the King?
But now I’ll keep you here secure:
No more you view the smoaky Sky:
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
For Idiots, like Thee and I.
Mary Leapor
To see both blended in one flood
The Mothers Milke, the Childrens blood,
Makes me doubt if Heaven will gather,
Roses hence, or Lillies rather.
Richard Crashaw
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.
W. B. Yeats
Vauxhall and Ranelagh! I then had heard
Of your green groves, and wilderness of lamps
Dimming the stars, and fireworks magical,
And gorgeous ladies, under splendid domes,
Floating in dance, or warbling high in air
The songs of spirits! Nor had Fancy fed
With less delight upon that other class
Of marvels, broad-day wonders permanent:
The River proudly bridged; the dizzy top
And Whispering Gallery of St. Paul’s; the tombs
Of Westminster; the Giants of Guildhall;
Bedlam, and those carved maniacs at the gates,
Perpetually recumbent; Statues – man,
And the horse under him – in gilded pomp
Adorning flowery gardens, ’mid vast squares;
The Monument, and that Chamber of the Tower
Where England’s sovereigns sit in long array,
Their steeds bestriding, – every mimic shape
Cased in the gleaming mail the monarch wore,
Whether for gorgeous tournament addressed,
Or life or death upon the battle-field.
Those bold imaginations in due time
Had vanished, leaving others in their stead:
And now I looked upon the living scene;
Familiarly perused it; oftentimes,
In spite of strongest disappointment, pleased
Through courteous self-submission, as a tax
Paid to the object by prescriptive right.
Rise up, thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain
Of a too busy world! Before me flow,
Thou endless stream of men and moving things!
Thy every-day appearance, as it strikes –
With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe –
On strangers, of all ages; the quick dance
Of colours, lights, and forms; the deafening din;
The comers and the goers face to face,
Face after face; the string of dazzling wares,
Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names,
And all the tradesman’s honours overhead:
Here, fronts of houses, like a title-page,
With letters huge inscribed from top to toe,
Stationed above the door, like guardian saints;
There, allegoric shapes, female or male,
Or physiognomies of real men,
Land-warriors, kings, or admirals of the sea,
Boyle, Shakspeare, Newton, or the attractive head
Of some quack-doctor, famous in his day.
Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequestered nook,
Still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud!
At leisure, thence, through tracts of thin resort,
And sights and sounds that come at intervals,
We take our way. A raree-show is here,
With children gathered round; another street
Presents a company of dancing dogs,
Or dromedary, with an antic pair
Of monkeys on his back; a minstrel band
Of Savoyards; or, single and alone,
An English ballad-singer. Private courts,
Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes
Thrilled by some female vendor’s scream, belike
The very shrillest of all London cries,
May then entangle our impatient steps;
Conducted through those labyrinths, unawares,
To privileged regions and inviolate,
Where from their airy lodges studious lawyers
Look out on waters, walks, and gardens green.
Thence back into the throng, until we reach,
Following the tide that slackens by degrees,
Some half-frequented scene, where wider streets
Bring straggling breezes of suburban air.
Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls;
Advertisements, of giant-size, from high
Press forward, in all colours, on the sight;
These, bold in conscious merit, lower down;
‘That’, fronted with a most imposing word,
Is, peradventure, one in masquerade.
As on the broadening causeway we advance,
Behold, turned upwards, a face hard and strong
In lineaments, and red with over-toil.
’Tis one encountered here and everywhere;
A travelling cripple, by the trunk cut short,
And stumping on his arms. In sailor’s garb
Another lies at length, beside a range
Of well-formed characters, with chalk inscribed
Upon the smooth flint stones: the Nurse is here,
The Bachelor, that loves to sun himself,
The military Idler, and the Dame,
That field-ward takes her walk with decent steps.
William Wordsworth
If you ask what my favourite programme is
it has to be that strange world jigsaw final.
After the winner had defeated all his rivals
with harder and harder jigsaws, he had to prove his mettle
by completing one last absolute mind crusher
on his own, under the cameras, in less than a week.
We saw, but he did not, what the picture would be:
the mid-Atlantic, photographed from a plane,
as featureless a stretch as could be found,
no weeds, no flotsam, no birds, no oil, no ships,
the surface neither stormy nor calm, but ordinary,
a light wind on a slowly rolling swell.
Hand-cut by a fiendish jigger to simulate,
but not to have, identical beaks and bays,
it seemed impossible, but the candidate –
he said he was a stateless person, called himself Smith –
was impressive: small, dark, nimble, self-contained.
The thousands of little grey tortoises were scattered
on the floor of the studio; we saw the clock; we started.
His food was brought to him, but he hardly ate.
He had a bed, with the light only dimmed to a weird blue,
never out. By the first day he had established
the edges, saw the picture was three metres long
and appeared to represent (dear God!) the sea.
Well, it was a man’s life, and the silence
(broken only by sighs, click of wood, plop of coffee
in paper cups) that kept me fascinated.
Even when one hand was picking the edge-pieces
I noticed his other hand was massing sets
of distinguishing ripples or darker cross-hatching or
incipient wave-crests; his mind,
if not his face, worked like a sea.
It was when he suddenly rose from his bed
at two, on the third night, went straight over
to one piece and slotted it into a growing central patch,
then back to bed, that I knew he would make it.
On the sixth day he looked haggard and slow,
with perhaps a hundred pieces left,
of the most dreary unmarked lifeless grey.
The camera showed the clock more frequently.
He roused himself, and in a quickening burst
of activity, with many false starts, began
to press that inhuman insolent remnant together.
He did it, on the evening of the sixth day.
People streamed onto the set. Bands played.
That was fine. But what I liked best
was the last shot of the completed sea,
filling the screen, then the saw-lines disappeared,
till almost imperceptibly the surface moved
and it was again the real Atlantic, glad
to distraction to be released, raised
above itself in growing gusts, allowed
to roar as rain drove down and darkened,
allowed to blot, for a moment, the orderer’s hand.
Edwin Morgan
Wake all the dead! What ho! What ho!
How soundly they sleep whose pillows lie low!
They mind not poor lovers who walk above
On the decks of the world in storms of love.
No whisper now nor glance can pass
Through wickets or through panes of glass;
For our windows and doors are shut and barred.
Lie close in the church, and in the churchyard.
In every grave make room, make room!
The world’s at an end, and we come, we come.
The state is now love’s foe, love’s foe;
Has seized on his arms, his quiver and bow;
Has pinioned his wings, and fettered his feet,
Because he made way for lovers to meet.
But O sad chance, his judge was old;
Hearts cruel grow, when blood grows cold.
No man being young his process would draw.
O heavens that love should be subject to law!
Lovers go woo the dead, the dead!
Lie two in a grave, and to bed, to bed!
Sir William Davenant
– And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.
And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides, –
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave, –
Hasten, while they are true, – sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
Hart Crane
Solitude is where writers
chatter best
a soothing static –
the ambulatory, admit it, happy
ticking over
in the sweet green cold London
spring
I watch a tall grey heron
stomping down its reed nest
that’s sprouting everywhere
like garden-sheared hair
and all my living
and all my dead
run up my arms
like squirrels.
Dorothy Porter
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.
Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.
In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.
Still-born, they don’t always die,
but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.
To thrust all that life under your tongue! –
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death’s sad bone; bruised, you’d say,
and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
Anne Sexton
Pictures of violins in the Wurlitzer collection
Were my bedroom’s one decoration,
Besides a blue horse and childish tan maiden by Gauguin –
Backs, bellies, and scrolls,
Stradivarius, Guarnerius, Amati,
Colored like a calabash-and-meerschaum pipe bowl’s
Warmed, matured body –
The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she’d have to change the day after.
I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.
My hero, once I’d read about him,
Was the emperor Hadrian; my villain, Bar Kokhba,
The Jew Hadrian had crushed out at Jerusalem:
Both in the Cambridge Ancient History’s Hadrian chapter (1936
Edition), by some German. (The Olympics
Year of my birth and Jesse Owens’s putsch it had appeared.)
Even then, in ’49, my mother was dying.
Dressed in her fresh-air blue starched uniform,
The maid would come from Mother’s room crying
With my mother’s tears shining on her arm,
And run to grab her beads and crucifix and missal,
I to find my violin and tuning whistle
To practice my lessons. Mendelssohn. Or Bach,
Whose Lutheran fingering had helped pluck
The tonsured monks like toadstools from their lawns,
And now riddled the armor I would have to shuck:
His were life-sized hands behind his puppet Mendelssohn’s.
One night, by the blue of her nitelite, I watched the maid
Weaving before her mirror in the dark, naked.
Her eyes rolled, whiskey-bright; the glass was black, dead.
‘Will you come true? It’s me, it’s me,’ she said.
Her hands and her hips clung to her rolling pelvis.
Her lips smacked and I saw her smile, pure lead
And silver, like a child, and shape a kiss.
All night I tossed. I saw the face,
The shoulders and the slight breasts – but a boy’s face,
A soft thing tangled, singing, in his arms,
Singing and foaming, while his blinding pelvis,
Scooped out, streamed. His white eyes dreamed,
While the black face pounded with syncope and madness.
And then, in clear soprano, we both screamed.
What a world of mirrored darkness! Agonized, elated,
Again years later I would see it with my naked
Eye – see Harlem: doped up and heartless,
Loved up by heroin, running out of veins
And out of money and out of arms to hold it – where
I saw dead saplings wired to stakes in lanes
Of ice, like hair out cold in hair straightener.
And that wintry morning, trudging through Harlem
Looking for furnished rooms, I heard the solemn
Pedal-toned bowing of the Bach Chaconne.
I’d played it once! How many tears
Had shined on Mother’s face since then?
Ten years! I had been trying to find a room ten years,
It seemed that day, and been turned down again and again.
No violin could thaw
The rickety and raw
Purple window I shivered below, stamping my shoes.
Two boys in galoshes came goose-stepping down
The sheer-ice long white center line of Lenox Avenue.
A blue-stormcoated Negro patrolman,
With a yellowing badge star, bawled at them. I left too.
I had given up violin and left St. Louis,
I had given up being Jewish,
To be at Harvard just another
Greek nose in street clothes in Harvard Yard.
Mother went on half dying.
I wanted to live in Harlem. I was almost unarmoured …
Almost alone – like Hadrian crying
As his death came on, ‘Your Hadrianus
Misses you, Antinous,
Misses your ankles slender as your wrists,
Dear child. We want to be alone.
His back was the city gates of Rome.
And now Jerusalem is dust in the sun.
His skies are blue. He’s coming, child, I come.’
Frederick Seidel
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonishèd.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors, of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence.
But when your countenance filled up his line,
Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine.
William Shakespeare
This moonlight makes
The lovely lovelier
Than ever before lakes
And meadows were.
And yet they are not,
Though this their hour is, more
Lovely than things that were not
Lovely before.
Nothing on earth,
And in the heavens no star,
For pure brightness is worth
More than that jar,
For wasps meant, now
A star – long may it swing
From the dead apple-bough,
So glistening.
Edward Thomas
The apples on the tree are full of wasps;
Red apples, racing like hearts. The summer pushes
Her tongue into the winter’s throat.
But at six today, like rain, like the first drops,
The wasps came battering softly at the black glass.
They want the light, the cold is at their backs.
That morning last year when the light had been left on
The strange room terrified the heart in me,
I could not place myself, didn’t know my own
Insect scribble: then saw the whole soft
Pelt of wasps, its underbelly, the long black pane
Yellow with visitants, it seethed, the glass sounded.
I bless my life: that so much wants in.
David Constantine
It was the frosty early hours when finally
The cow’s despairing groans rolled him from bed
And into his boots, hardly awake yet.
He called ‘Dan! come on, Dan!
She’s calving’, and stumbled without his coat
Down the icy path to the haggard.
Castor and Pollux were fixed in line
Over his head but he didn’t see them,
This night any more than another.
He crossed to the stall, past the corner
Of the fairy-fort he’d levelled last May.
But this that stopped him, like the mind’s step
Backward: what was that, more insistent
Than the calf’s birth-pangs? ‘Hold on, Dan.
I think I’m having a weakness.
I never had a weakness, Dan, before.’
And down he slid, groping for the lapels
Of the shocked boy’s twenty-year-old jacket.
Bernard O’Donoghue
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly:
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at ‘The Travellers’ Rest’,
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.
This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh, and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate-bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
Thomas Hardy
Most Saturday afternoons
At the local Hippodrome
Saw the Pathé-News rooster,
Then the recurring dream
Of a lonesome drifter
Through uninterrupted range.
Will Hunter, so gifted
He could peel an orange
In a single, fluent gesture,
Was the leader of our gang.
The curtain rose this afternoon
On a lion, not a gong.
When the crippled girl
Who wanted to be a dancer
Met the married man
Who was dying of cancer,
Our hankies unfurled
Like flags of surrender.
I believe something fell asunder
In even Will Hunter’s hands.
Paul Muldoon
Beyond the moor and mountain crest
– Comrade, look not on the west –
The sun is down and drinks away
From air and land the lees of day.
The long cloud and the single pine
Sentinel the ending line,
And out beyond it, clear and wan,
Reach the gulfs of evening on.
The son of woman turns his brow
West from forty counties now,
And, as the edge of heaven he eyes,
Thinks eternal thoughts, and sighs.
Oh wide’s the world, to rest or roam,
With change abroad and cheer at home,
Fights and furloughs, talk and tale,
Company and beef and ale.
But if I front the evening sky
Silent on the west look I,
And my comrade, stride for stride,
Paces silent at my side.
Comrade, look not on the west:
’Twill have the heart out of your breast;
’Twill take your thoughts and sink them far,
Leagues beyond the sunset bar.
Oh lad, I fear that yon’s the sea
Where they fished for you and me,
And there, from whence we both were ta’en,
You and I shall drown again.
To dive from that beguiling shore,
And let not yet the swimmer leave
His clothes upon the sands of eve.
Too fast to yonder strand forlorn
We journey, to the sunken bourn,
To flush the fading tinges eyed
By other lads at eventide.
Wide is the world, to rest or roam,
And early ’tis for turning home:
Plant your heel on earth and stand,
And let’s forget our native land.
When you and I are spilt on air
Long we shall be strangers there;
Friends of flesh and bone are best:
Comrade, look not on the west.
A. E. Housman
for Fabbio Doplicher
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the mayor, mulled
a cheap date, they asked us; what’s
flat drink). Among Italian literati
we could recognise our counterparts:
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib – and there was one
administrator (the conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book
back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans
were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
‘What’s poetry?’
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?’ Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think – ‘The truth
is both, it’s both,’ I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statute represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. ‘If God is not the soul itself, He is
the soul of the soul of the world.’ Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That’s
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
And poetry –
(we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
softly) –
poetry is what
he thought, but did not say.
Heather McHugh
What is our life? The play of passion.
Our mirth? The music of division:
Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for life’s short comedy.
The earth the stage; Heaven the spectator is,
Who sits and views whosoe’er doth act amiss.
The graves which hide us from the scorching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus playing post we to our latest rest,
And then we die in earnest, not in jest.
Sir Walter Raleigh
What is the language using us for?
Said Malcolm Mooney moving away
Slowly over the white language.
Where am I going said Malcolm Mooney.
Certain experiences seem to not
Want to go in to language maybe
Because of shame or the reader’s shame.
Let us observe Malcolm Mooney.
Let us get through the suburbs and drive
Out further just for fun to see
What he will do. Reader, it does
Not matter. He is only going to be
Myself and for you slightly you
Wanting to be another. He fell
He falls (Tenses are everywhere.)
Deep down into a glass jail.
I am in a telephoneless, blue
Green crevasse and I can’t get out.
I pay well for my messages
Being hoisted up when you are about.
I suppose you open them under the light
Of midnight of The Dancing Men.
The point is would you ever want
To be down here on the freezing line
Reading the words that steam out
Against the ice? Anyhow draw
This folded message up between
The leaning prisms from me below.
Slowly over the white language
Comes Malcolm Mooney the saviour.
My left leg has no feeling.
What is the language using us for?
W. S. Graham
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
Doth God exact day labour, light denied,
I fondly ask; but patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.
John Milton
When I grow up I want to have a bad leg.
I want to limp down the street I live in
without knowing where I am. I want the disease
where you put your hand on your hip
and lean forward slightly, groaning to yourself.
If a little boy asks me the way
I’ll try and touch him between the legs.
What a dirty old man I’m going to be when I grow up!
What shall we do with me?
I promise I’ll be good
if you let me fall over in the street
and lie there calling like a baby bird. Please,
nobody come. I’m perfectly all right. I like it here.
I wonder would it be possible
to get me into a National Health Hospice
somewhere in Manchester?
I’ll stand in the middle of my cubicle
holding onto a piece of string for safety,
shaking like a leaf at the thought of my suitcase.
I’d certainly like to have a nervous tic
so I can purse my lips up all the time
like Cecil Beaton. Can I be completely bald, please?
I love the smell of old pee.
Why can’t I smell like that?
When I grow up I want a thin piece of steel
inserted into my penis for some reason.
Nobody’s to tell me why it’s there. I want to guess!
Tell me, is that a bottle of old Burgundy
under my bed? I never can tell
if I feel randy any more, can you?
I think it’s only fair that I should be allowed
to cough up a bit of blood when I feel like it.
My daughter will bring me a special air cushion
to hold me upright and I’ll watch
in baffled admiration as she blows it up for me.
Here’s my list: nappies, story books, munchies,
something else. What was the other thing?
I can’t remember exactly,
but when I grow up I’ll know. When I grow up
I’ll pluck at my bedclothes to collect lost thoughts.
I’ll roll them into balls and swallow them.
Hugo Williams
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like full garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel 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.
John Keats
When Lazarus left his charnel-cave,
And home to Mary’s house return’d,
Was this demanded – if he yearn’d
To hear her weeping by his grave?
‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’
There lives no record of reply,
Which telling what it is to die
Had surely added praise to praise.
From every house the neighbours met,
The streets were fill’d with joyful sound,
A solemn gladness even crown’d
The purple brows of Olivet.
Behold a man raised up by Christ!
The rest remaineth unreveal’d;
He told it not; or something seal’d
The lips of that Evangelist.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
When the eye of day is shut,
And the stars deny their beams,
And about the forest hut
Blows the roaring wood of dreams,
From deep clay, from desert rock,
From the sunk sands of the main,
Come not at my door to knock,
Hearts that loved me not again.
Sleep, be still, turn to your rest
In the lands where you are laid;
In far lodgings east and west
Lie down on the beds you made.
In gross marl, in blowing dust,
In the drowned ooze of the sea,
Where you would not, lie you must,
Lie you must, and not with me.
A. E. Housman
When thou must home to shades of under ground,
And there ariv’d, a newe admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round,
White Iope, blith Hellen, and the rest,
To heare the stories of thy finisht love
From that smoothe toong whose musicke hell can move;
Then wilt thou speake of banqueting delights,
Of masks and revels which sweete youth did make,
Of Turnies and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphes for thy beauties sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me.
Thomas Campion
When to my deadlie pleasure,
When to my livelie torment,
Ladie mine eyes remained,
Joyned alas to your beames,
With violence of heav’nly
Beautie tied to vertue,
Reason abasht retyred,
Gladly my senses yeelded.
Gladly my senses yeelding,
Thus to betray my hart’s fort,
Left me devoid of all life;
They to the beamie Sunnes went,
Where by the death of all deaths,
Finde to what harme they hastned,
Like to the silly Sylvan,
Burn’d by the light he best liked,
When with a fire he first met.
Yet, yet, a life to their death,
Lady you have reserved,
Lady the life of all love;
For though my sense be from me,
And I be dead who want sense,
Yet do we both live in you.
Turned anew by your meanes,
Unto the flowre that ay turnes,
As you, alas, my Sunne bends;
Thus do I fall to rise thus,
Thus do I dye to live thus,
Changed to a change, I change not.
Thus may I not be from you:
Thus be my senses on you:
Thus what I thinke is of you:
Thus what I seeke is in you:
All what I am, it is you.
Sir Philip Sidney
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
– An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl – and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Philip Larkin
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?
All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.
I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids,
conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,
I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.
Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
Having pried through the strate, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with
doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’ compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick
at night.
I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,
after all.)
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten
million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
Walt Whitman
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
Christina Rossetti
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as the fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
‘Noli me tangere for Ceasar’s I am,
And wild for to hold though I seem tame.’
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?
’Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace.
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss.
Th’offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.
Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
William Shakespeare
And Gwydion said to Math, when it was Spring:
‘Come now and let us make a wife for Llew.’
And so they broke broad boughs yet moist with dew,
And in a shadow made a magic ring:
They took the violet and the meadowsweet
To form her pretty face, and for her feet
They built a mound of daisies on a wing,
And for her voice they made a linnet sing
In the wide poppy blowing for her mouth.
And over all they chanted twenty hours.
And Llew came singing from the azure south
And bore away his wife of birds and flowers.
Francis Ledwidge
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port, –
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
Emily Dickinson
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and
gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I loved the way it walks;
I wish I loved the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!
Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore.
The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.
Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.
Louis MacNeice
A pen appeared, and the god said:
‘Write what it is to be
man.’ And my hand hovered
long over the bare page,
until there, like footprints
of the lost traveller, letters
took shape on the page’s
blankness, and I spelled out
the word ‘lonely’. And my hand moved
to erase it; but the voices
of all those waiting at life’s
window cried out loud: ‘It is true.’
R. S. Thomas
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair –
The bees are stirring birds – are on the wing –
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may;
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The world’s a minefield when I think of you.
I must walk carefully in case I touch
some irretrievable and secret switch
that blows the old world back into the new.
How careless I once was about this ground
with the negligence of ignorance. Now I take
the smallest delicate steps and now I look
about me and about me without end.
Iain Crichton Smith
I was in a skiffle group
In 1959,
One chord to a line,
We were doing
Fine,
Playing Worried Man upon
The Hurst Green Church Hall stage,
Fifteen years of age
When Lonnie was
Tea-chest bass and washboard and
Two three-chord tricks:
Somehow
No worries then:
My God I’m worried now.
Kit Wright
I am soft sift
In an hourglass – at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.
I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.
Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt –
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt –
But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).
Gerard Manley Hopkins
You sea! I resign myself to you also – I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of
the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.
Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.
Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.
(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house
that supports them?)
I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and
rectified?
I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,
Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.
This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.
What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such
a wonder,
The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man
or an infidel.
Walt Whitman
To amuse His Royal Majesty he will change water into wine.
Frogs into footmen. Beetles into bailiffs. And make a Minister
out of a rat. He bows, and daisies grow from his finger-tips.
And a talking bird sits on his shoulder.
Think up something else, demands His Royal Majesty.
Think up a black star. So he thinks up a black star.
Think up dry water. So he thinks up dry water.
Think up a river bound with straw-bands. So he does.
There.
Then along comes a student and asks: Think up sine alpha greater
than one.
And Žito grows pale and sad: Terribly sorry. Sine is
between plus one and minus one. Nothing you can do about that.
And he leaves the great royal empire, quietly weaves his way
through the throng of courtiers, to his home
in a nutshell.
Miroslav Holub, trans. by
Ian Milner and George Theiner