A Selection of Poems
Fall 2013 Let’s Talk About It
“I Like to See It Lap the Miles”
(1891)
Emily Dickinson (1830-86)
I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent—
At its own stable door.
“To a Locomotive in Winter”
(1876)
Walt Whitman (1819-92)
Thee for my recitative!
Thee in the driving storm, even as now—the snow—the winter-day declining;
Thee in thy panoply, thy measured 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 piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, 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.
“Window”
(1916)
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Night from a railroad car window
Is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.
“Night Journey”
Theodore Roethke (1908-63)
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.
“Riding the A”
(1978)
May Swenson (1913-89)
I ride
the "A" train
and feel
like a ballbearing in a roller skate.
I have on a gray
raincoat. The hollow
of the car
is gray.
My face
a negative in the slate
window,
I sit
in a lit
corridor that races
through a dark
one. Stroking steel,
what a smooth rasp—it feels
like the newest of knives
slicing
along
a long
black crusty loaf
from West 4th to 168th.
Wheels
and rails
in their prime
collide,
make love in a glide
of slickness
and friction.
It is an elation
I wish to prolong.
The station
is reached
too soon.
“January Chance”
Mark Van Doren (1894-1972)
All afternoon before them, father and boy,
In a plush well, with winter sounding past:
In the warm cubicle between two high
Seat backs that slumber, voyaging the vast.
All afternoon to open the deep things
That long have waited, suitably unsaid.
Now one of them is older, and the other’s
Art at last has audience; has head,
Has heart to take it in. It is the time.
Begin, says winter, howling through the pane.
Begin, the seat back bumps: what safer hour
Than this, within the somnolent loud train,
A prison where the corridors slide on
As the walls creak, remembering downgrade?
Begin. But with a smile the father slumps
And sleeps. And so the man is never made.
“In a Station of the Metro”
(1913)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.