POETRY BY OTHERS

The Summer Rain Henry David Thoreau (1842) My books I’d fain cast off, I cannot read,   ’Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,   And will not mind to hit their proper targe. Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,   Our Shakespeare’s life were rich to live again, What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,   Nor Shakespeare’s books, unless his books were men. Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,   What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town, If juster battles are enacted now   Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown? Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,   If red or black the gods will favor most, Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,   Struggling to heave some rock against the host. Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,   For now I’ve business with this drop of dew, And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower—   I’ll meet him shortly when the sky is blue. This bed of herd’s grass and wild oats was spread   Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use. A clover tuft is pillow for my head,   And violets quite overtop my shoes. And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,   And gently swells the wind to say all’s well; The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,   Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell. I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;   But see that globe come rolling down its stem, Now like a lonely planet there it floats,   And now it sinks into my garment’s hem. Drip drip the trees for all the country round,   And richness rare distills from every bough; The wind alone it is makes every sound,   Shaking down crystals on the leaves below. For shame the sun will never show himself,   Who could not with his beams e’er melt me so; My dripping locks—they would become an elf,   Who in a beaded coat does gayly go. SUMMER STARS Carl Sandberg  Bend low again, night of summer stars.  So near you are, sky of summer stars,  So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars,  Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl So near you are, summer stars,  So near, strumming, strumming,  So lazy and hum-strumming  Shall I Compare Thee to A Summer Day? William Shakespeare 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 wand'rest 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.

William Butler Yeats

 Sailing to Byzantium

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Ranier Maria Rilke


William Shakespeare

SONNET 73
That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which, by and by, black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Love's Growth BY JOHN DONNE I scarce believe my love to be so pure  As I had thought it was,   Because it doth endure Vicissitude, and season, as the grass; Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more. But if medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense, And of the sun his working vigor borrow, Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do. And yet no greater, but more eminent,    Love by the spring is grown;    As, in the firmament, Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown, Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough, From love’s awakened root do bud out now. If, as water stirred more circles be Produced by one, love such additions take, Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make, For they are all concentric unto thee; And though each spring do add to love new heat, As princes do in time of action get New taxes, and remit them not in peace, No winter shall abate the spring’s increase. A. E. Housman

"Loveliest of Trees"

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

GEORGE BARKER

Sonnet to My Mother
Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais but most tender for
The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her,­
She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.
She will not glance up at the bomber or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain  
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.


Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

          A Supermarket in California

             Allen  Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked

on the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious

looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the

neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at

night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the

tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca,¹ what were you doing down by the

watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking

among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?

What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following

you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy

tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never

passing the cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.

Which way does your beard point tonight?

   (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket

and feel absurd.)

   Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade

to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

   Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue

automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

   Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what

America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you

got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear

on the black waters of Lethe?³

Constantine Cavafy

Ellen Bass

WING  ROAD

eamon  Grennan

Amazing how the young man who empties

Our dustbin ascends the truck as it moves

Away from him; rises up like an angel

In a china-blue check shirt and lilac

Woolen cap, dirty work gloves, berry-red

Bandanna flapping his throat. He plants

One foot above the mudguard, locks his

Left hand to a steel bar stemming

From the dumper's loud mouth, and is borne

Away, light as a cat, right leg dangling,

The bright air snatching at that black-

Bearded face. He breaks to a smile, leans wide,

And takes the morning to his puffed chest,

His right arm stretched far out, a checkered

China-blue wing gliding between blurred earth

And heaven, a messenger under the locust trees

That stand in silent panic at his passage. But

His mission is not among the trees; he

Has flanked both sunlit rims of Wing Road

With empty dustbins, each lying on its side,

Its lid a fallen shield beside it, each

Letting the moonlight scour its emptiness

To shining. Carried off in a sudden cloud

Of diesel smoke, in a woeful crying out of

Brakes and gears, in a roaring of monstrous

Mechanical appetite, he has left this secret

Radiance straggled behind him where the crows,

Covening in branches, will flash and haggle.

Mark Doty
A Green Crab's Shell

Not, exactly, green:

closer to bronze

preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved

from a Greco-Roman wreck,

patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot

know  what his fantastic

legs were like—

though evidence

suggests eight

complexly folded

scuttling works

of armament, crowned

by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace

and power. A gull's

gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber

—size of a demitasse—

open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.

Though it smells

of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case

comes with such lavish lining!

Imagine breathing

surrounded by

the brilliant rinse

of summer's firmament.

What color is

the underside of skin?

Not so bad, to die,

if  we could be opened

into this—

If the smallest chambers

of ourselves,

similarly,

revealed some sky.

 

Seamus Heaney

Mossbawn

 For Mary Heaney

I. Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.

The helmeted pump in the yard

heated its iron,

water honeyed

 in the slung bucket

and the sun stood

like a griddle cooling

against the wall

of each long afternoon.

So, her hands scuffled

over the bakeboard,

the reddening stove

 sent its plaque of heat

against her where she stood

in a floury apron

by the window.

 Now she dusts the board

with a goose's wing,

now sits, broad-lapped,

with whitened nails

 and measling shins:

here is a space

again, the scone rising

to the tick of two clocks.

 And here is love

like a tinsmith's scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin.

 2. The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

You'll know them if I can get them true.

They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes

Buried under that straw.

With time to kill,

They are taking their time.

Each sharp knife goes

Lazily halving each root that falls apart

In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom

Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

With all of us there, our anonymities.

Pierre de Ronsard

from Sonnets pour Hélène

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,

  Assise auprez du feu, devidant et filant,

Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant:

Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j'estois belle.

  Lors vous n'aurez servant oyant telle nouvelle,

Desja sous le labeur à demy sommeillant,

Qui au bruit de Ronsard ne s'aille resveillant,

Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.

  Je seray sous terre, et fantosme sans os,

Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos;

Vous serez au fouyer une vieille accroupie,

  Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.

Vivez, si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain,

Cueillez dès aujourd'huy les roses de la vie.

(English rendition by Humbert Wolfe)

When you are old, at evening candle-lit,

  beside the fire bending to your wool,

read out my verse and murmur "Ronsard writ

  this praise for me when I was beautiful."

And not a maid but at the sound of it,

  though nodding at the stitch on broidered stool,

will start awake, and bless love's benefit,

  whose long fidelities bring Time to school.

I shall be thin and ghost beneath the earth,

  by myrtle-shade in quiet after pain,

but you, a crone will crouch beside the hearth,

  mourning my love and all your proud disdain.

And what comes to-morrow who can say?

Live, pluck the roses of the world to-day.

 John Donne

Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness

           (written from his death bed)

Since I am coming to that holy room

Where, with Thy choir of saints forevermore,

I shall be made Thy Music, as I come

I tune the instrument here at the door,

And what I must do then, think here before.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown

Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie

Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown

That this is my South-west discovery

Per fretum febris by these straits to die,

I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;

For, though their current yield return to none,

What shall my West hurt me? As West and East

In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,

So death doth touch the resurrection.

Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are

The Eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?

Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,

All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,

Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.

We think that Paradise and Calvary,

Christ's Cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;

Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;

As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,

May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

So in His purple wrapped, receive me, Lord,

By these His thorns give me His other crown;

And, as to others' souls I preached Thy word,

Be this my text, my sermon to mine own,

Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down.

Ogden Nash

Very Like a Whale

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for

Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,

Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.

What does it mean when we are told

That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?

In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough ex­perience

To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians.

However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity,

We’ll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.

Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,

Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold?

In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are a great many things,

But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.

No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;

Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof  woof?

Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,

Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host,

But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me, no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and  then inter­polate them,

With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones

 that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.

That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;

They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,

And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm.Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket

 of un-poetical blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,

And after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly

What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.