English Supplemental Poetry Packet - Ms. Tucker
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“Madam, Withouten Many Words” by Thomas Wyatt
“Tichborne’s Elegy” by Chidiok Tichborne
“Sonnet 18” “Sonnet 29” and “Sonnet 138” by William Shakespeare
“Death be not proud” by John Donne
“On Spies” by Ben Jonson
“Virtue” by George Herbert
“To My Dear and Loving Husband” by Anne Bradstreet
“When I Consider How My Light is Spent” by John Milton
“To The Right Honorable William Earl of Dartmouth” by Phyllis Wheatly
“This Living Hand” by John Keats
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” and “Beat! Beat! Drums” by Walt Whitman
“Many red devils” and “Fast rode the knight” by Stephen Crane
Poems “328” & “754” by Emily Dickinson
“The Convergence of the Twain” by Thomas Hardy
“Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats
“Chicago” by Carl Sandburg
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
“next to of course god america i” by ee cummings
“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas
“Stopping by woods on a snowy evening” and “Design” by Robert Frost
“The Sea Elephant” by William Carlos Williams
“Inscription for a war” by A.D. Hope
“The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens
“The Elm” by Sylvia Plath
“The Fury of Sunsets” by Anne Sexton
“The Mother” and “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks
“The Siren Song” by Margaret Atwood
“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
“A Story about the Body” by Robert Hass
“After Years” & “So This is Nebraska” by Ted Kooser
Name: ______________________________________________
Class Period: ______
!1
1.
Thomas Wyatt (Unknown ~1557)
Madam, Withouten Many Words
Madam, withouten many words
Once I am sure ye will or no;
And if ye will, then leave your bords1
And use your wit and show it so,
And with a beck2 ye shall me call;
And if of one that burneth alway
Ye have any pity at all,
Answer him fair with yea or nay.
If it be yea I shall be fain;3
If it be nay, friends as before;
Ye shall another man obtain,
And I mine own and yours no more.
1
jests
2 A gesture,
3
such as a nod of the head or a motion of the forefinger.
Well-pleased
!2
2.
Chidiok Tichborne (1586)
Tichborne’s Elegy4
Written with his own hand in the Tower before his execution
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,5
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,6
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade;
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass7 is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Tichborne was imprisoned in the Tower of London and executed after being implicated in a Catholic plot against Queen
Elizabeth. Only three poems by Tichborne were preserved in manuscripts.
4
5
weeds
6 An
allusion to the three Fates, who spun the threat that determined the length of a person’s life and cut it when he or she was
destined to die.
7
hourglass
!3
3.
William Shakespeare (1580s-1600s)
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 29
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee—and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 138
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
!4
4.
John Donne
10.
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy’, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better then thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
5.
Ben Jonson (1616)
On Spies Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,
Who, when you've burnt yourselves down to the snuff,8
Stink, and are thrown away. End fair enough.
8
Candle end
!5
6.
George Herbert (1633, published posthumously)
Virtue
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight;
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,9
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets10 compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,11
And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,12
Then chiefly lives.
7.
Anne Bradstreet (1650)
To My Dear and Loving Husband
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.
9
Splendid; “angry”: i.e.e., red, the color of anger.
10
perfumes
11 A close
12 An
is a cadence, the conclusion of a musical strain.
allusion to Judgment Day, when the world will end in a great fire (2 Peter 3.10)
!6
8.
John Milton (1652)
When I Consider How My Light is Spent
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-labor, 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."
9.
Phillis Wheatley, 1753 - 1784
To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth
HAIL, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The northern clime beneath her genial ray,
Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:
Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,
Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,
While in thine hand with pleasure we behold
The silken reins, and Freedom’s charms unfold.
Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies
She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:
Soon as appear’d the Goddess long desir’d,
Sick at the view, she languish’d and expir’d;
Thus from the splendors of the morning light
The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,
And thee we ask thy favours to renew,
Since in thy pow’r, as in thy will before,
To sooth the griefs, which thou did’st once deplore.
May heav’nly grace the sacred sanction give
To all thy works, and thou for ever live
Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,
Though praise immortal crowns the patriot’s name,
But to conduct to heav’ns refulgent fane,
May fiery coursers sweep th’ ethereal plain,
And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,
Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God.
!7
10.
John Keats (1810s)
This Living Hand
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 wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
11.
Walt Whitman (1855)
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
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 the 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.
!8
11.
Walt Whitman (1855)
Beat! Beat! Drums
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation;
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with
his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, plowing his field or gathering his
grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers
must sleep in those beds;
No bargainers' bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—
would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums--you bugles wilder blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation;
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the
hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
!9
12.
Stephen Crane (1890s)
Many red devils
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page,
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
Fast rode the knight
Fast rode the knight
With spurs, hot and reeking,
Ever waving an eager sword,
"To save my lady!"
Fast rode the knIght,
And leaped from saddle to war.
Men of steel flickered and gleamed
Like riot of silver lights,
And the gold of the knight's good banner
Still waved on a castle wall.
.....
A horse,
Blowing, staggering, bloody thing,
Forgotten at foot of castle wall.
A horse
Dead at foot of castle wall.
!10
13.
Emily Dickinson (1891)
#328
A Bird came down the Walk –
He did not know I saw –
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought –
He stirred his Velvet Head
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home –
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam -Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless13 as they swim.
#754
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—
And when at Night—Our good Day done—
I guard My Master's Head—
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow15—to have shared—
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him—
The Mountains straight reply—
To foe of His—I'm deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
Or an emphatic Thumb—
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face14
Had let its pleasure through—
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
13
splashless
14
I.e., a face capable of erupting like Mount Vesuvius, the volcano near Naples.
15
I.e., pillow stuffed with feathers or down.
!11
14.
Thomas Hardy (1912)
The Convergence of the Twain
Lines on the Loss of the Titanic
1
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
2
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,16
Cold currents thrid,17 and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
3
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
4
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
5
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
6
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
7
Prepared a sinister mate
For her – so gaily great –
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
8
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
The ship’s fires, which burn though immersed in water, are compared to the salamander, a lizardlike creature that according
to fable could live in the midst of fire.
16
17
thread
!12
9
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
10
Or sign that they were bent
by paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
11
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
15.
William Butler Yeats (1916)
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
!13
16.
Carl Sandburg (1916)
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women
under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill
and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I
have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give
them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse
and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set
vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the
wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to
be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight
Handler to the Nation.
!14
17.
Langston Hughes (1919)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
(To W.E.B. Du Bois)
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
18.
ee cummings (1926)
“next to of course god america i
"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo18 by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
“Jingo” is both part of a mild oath and a reference to jingoism: extreme nationalism, especially as demonstrated in a
belligerent foreign policy.
18
!15
19.
Dylan Thomas (1920s ?)
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
!16
20.
Robert Frost (1922)
Stopping by woods on a snowy evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
!17
21. William Carlos Williams
The Sea-Elephant (1929-1935)
Trundled from
the strangeness of the sea—
a kind of
heaven—
Ladies and Gentlemen!
the greatest
sea-monster ever exhibited
alive
the gigantic
sea-elephant! O wallow
of flesh where
are
there fish enough for
that
appetite stupidity
cannot lessen?
Sick
of April's smallness
the little
leaves—
Flesh has lief of you
enormous sea—
Speak!
Blouaugh! (feed
me) my
flesh is riven—
fish after fish into his maw
unswallowing
to let them glide down
gulching back
half spittle half
brine
the
troubled eyes—torn
from the sea.
(In
a practical voice) They
ought
to put it back where
it came from.
Gape.
Strange head—
told by old sailors—
rising
bearded
to the surface—and
the only
sense out of them
is that woman's
Yes
it's wonderful but they
ought to
put it
back into the sea where
it came from.
Blouaugh!
Swing—ride
walk
on wires—toss balls
stoop and
contort yourselves—
But I
am love. I am
from the sea—
Blouaugh!
there is no crime save
the too-heavy
body
the sea
held playfully—comes
to the surface
the water
boiling
about the head the cows
scattering
fish dripping from
the bounty
of . . . and Spring
they say
Spring is icummen in—
!18
22.
A.D. Hope (1930-1970)
Inscription for a war
Stranger, go tell the Spartans
we died here obedient to their commands.
— Inscription at Thermopylae
Linger not, stranger. Shed no tear.
Go back to those who sent us here.
We are the young they drafted out
To wars their folly brought about.
Go tell those old men, safe in bed,
We took their orders and are dead.
23.
Wallace Stevens (1954)
The Snow Man
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.
!19
24.
Sylvia Plath (1962)
The Elm
For Ruth Fainlight
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it. Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing. Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic. I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires. Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. I let her go. I let her go Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me. I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? !20
I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches?— Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.
25. Anne Sexton (1970s)
The Fury Of Sunsets
Something
cold is in the air,
an aura of ice
and phlegm.
All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.
The horizon bleeds
and sucks its thumb.
The little red thumb
goes out of sight.
And I wonder about
this lifetime with myself,
this dream I'm living.
I could eat the sky
like an apple
but I'd rather
ask the first star:
why am I here?
why do I live in this house?
who's responsible?
eh?
!21
25.
Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)
The Mother
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.
We Real Cool
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
!22
26.
Margaret Atwood (1974)
Siren Song
This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls
the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.
I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song
is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique
at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.
!23
27. Mary Oliver (1993)
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
28. Robert Hass (1994)
A Story about the Body
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was
Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work
was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or
considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and
she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I
have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance
that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity – like music –
withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He
walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the
porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose
petals were on top; the rest of the bowl – she must have swept them from the corners of her studio – was
full of dead bees.
29 Ted Kooser (2005)
After Years
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
!24
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.
So This Is Nebraska
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
!25