“All My Pretty Ones” by Anne Sexton



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“All My Pretty Ones” by Anne Sexton

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart

where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;

a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber

you from the residence you could not afford: (5)

a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,

twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,

the love and legal verbiage of another will,

boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

I touch their cardboard faces. They must go. (10)

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile. (15)

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.

I lock them into their book and throw them out. (20)

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began

the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly

as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran

the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me

and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went (25)

down and recent years where you went flush

on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant

to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.

But before you had that second chance, I cried

on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died. (30)

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.

Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,

here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes, (35)

running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;

here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;

and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.

Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,

my first lost keeper, to love or look at later. (40)

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept

for three years, telling all she does not say

of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,

she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day

with your blood, will I drink down your glass (45)

of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years

goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

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Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

“America”

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can't stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb (5)

I don't feel good don't bother me.

I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave? (10)

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I'm sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? (15)

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. (20)

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I'm trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling. (25)

I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for

murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get. (30)

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. (35)

I won't say the Lord's Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over

from Russia.

I'm addressing you. (40)

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. (45)

It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie

producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me. (50)

I haven't got a chinaman's chance.

I'd better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals

an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and

twentyfivethousand mental institutions. (55)

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in

my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? (60)

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his

automobiles more so they're all different sexes

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists (65)

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they

sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the

speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the (70)

workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party

was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother

Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have

been a spy.

America you don're really want to go to war. (75)

America it's them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take

our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our (80)

auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.

Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. (85)

America is this correct?

I'd better get right down to the job.

It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts

factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. (90)

(1956)

• Wobblies -members of the Industrial Workers of the World or "IWW", socialists

• Spanish Loyalists - Spanish Civil War (1936-39)

• Sacco and Vanzetti - The arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti had coincided with the period of the most intense political repression in American history, the "Red Scare" 1919-20. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927, a date that became a watershed in twentieth-century American history. It became the last of a long train of events that had driven any sense of utopian vision out of American life. The workings of American democracy now seemed to many Americans as flawed and unjust as many of the older societies of the world, no longer embodying any bright ideal, but once again serving the interests of the rich and the powerful.

• Scottsboro Case - The International Labor Defense's (ILD) involvement in the Scottsboro case, more than any other event, crystallized black support for the radical political movements, especially the Communist Party, in the 1930s. Accused of raping two white women (Ruby Bates and Victoria Price) on a freight train near Paint Rock, Alabama, nine young black men, ages thirteen to twenty-one, were arrested on March 25, 1931, tried without adequate counsel, and hastily convicted on the basis of shallow evidence. All but one were sentenced to death. Already in the midst of a mass anti-lynching campaign begun a year earlier, the ILD gained the confidence of the defendants and their parents, initiated a legal and political campaign for their freedom, and in the process waged a vicious battle for control over the case with the NAACP, who accused the Communists of using the young men for propaganda purposes.

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W. B. Yeats

“An Irish Airmen Foresees His Death”

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross, (5)

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, (10)

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind (15)

In balance with this life, this death.

Kiltartan Cross – a poor village in the west of Ireland. Also said to be the spot where the poet Rafferty fell in love with the “Beauty of Ballyhee”.

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“Aubade” - Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. (10)

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not used, the love not given, time

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:

But at the total emptiness forever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. (20)

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says no rational being

Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing

that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round. (30)

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no-one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood. (40)

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house. (50)

(1977)

aubade: a poem or piece of music appropriate to and often in celebration of the early morning

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“Because I could not stop for Death” – Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death – 

He kindly stopped for me – 

The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 

And Immortality. (4)

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –  (8)

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring – 

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – 

We passed the Setting Sun –  (12)

Or rather – He passed us – 

The Dews drew quivering and chill – 

For only Gossamer, my Gown – 

My Tippet – only Tulle –  (16)

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground – 

The Roof was scarcely visible – 

The Cornice – in the Ground –  (20)

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity – 

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“Black Art” Amiri Baraka

Poems are bullshit unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled

on a step. Or black ladies dying

of men leaving nickel hearts

beating them down. Fuck poems (5)

and they are useful, wd they shoot

come at you, love what you are,

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder

strangely after pissing. We want live

words of the hip world live flesh & (10)

coursing blood. Hearts Brains

Souls splintering fire. We want poems

like fists beating niggers out of Jocks

or dagger poems in the slimy bellies

of the owner-jews. Black poems to (15)

smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches

whose brains are red jelly stuck

between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking

Whores! We want "poems that kill."

Assassin poems, Poems that shoot (20)

guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys

and take their weapons leaving them dead

with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff

poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite

politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (25)

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. . . tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh

. . . rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . Setting fire and death to

whities ass. Look at the Liberal

Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat

& puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrrr (30)

There's a negroleader pinned to

a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting

in hot flame Another negroleader

on the steps of the white house one

kneeling between the sheriff's thighs (35)

negotiating coolly for his people.

Agggh . . . stumbles across the room . . .

Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked

to the world! Another bad poem cracking

steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth (40)

Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets

Clean out the world for virtue and love,

Let there be no love poems written

until love can exist freely and

cleanly. Let Black People understand (45)

that they are the lovers and the sons

of lovers and warriors and sons

of warriors Are poems & poets &

all the loveliness here in the world

We want a black poem. And a (50)

Black World.

Let the world be a Black Poem

And Let All Black People Speak This Poem

Silently

or LOUD

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“Casualty” - Seamus Heaney

Seamus HeaneyI   

He would drink by himself   

And raise a weathered thumb   

Towards the high shelf,   

Calling another rum   

And blackcurrant, without    (5)

Having to raise his voice,   

Or order a quick stout   

By a lifting of the eyes   

And a discreet dumb-show   

Of pulling off the top;    (10)

At closing time would go   

In waders and peaked cap   

Into the showery dark,   

A dole-kept breadwinner   

But a natural for work.    (15)

I loved his whole manner,   

Sure-footed but too sly,   

His deadpan sidling tact,   

His fisherman’s quick eye   

And turned observant back.    (20)

Incomprehensible   

To him, my other life.   

Sometimes, on the high stool,   

Too busy with his knife   

At a tobacco plug    (25)

And not meeting my eye,   

In the pause after a slug   

He mentioned poetry.   

We would be on our own   

And, always politic    (30)

And shy of condescension,   

I would manage by some trick   

To switch the talk to eels   

Or lore of the horse and cart   

Or the Provisionals.    (35)

But my tentative art   

His turned back watches too:   

He was blown to bits   

Out drinking in a curfew   

Others obeyed, three nights    (40)

After they shot dead   

The thirteen men in Derry.   

PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,   

BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday   

Everyone held    (45)

His breath and trembled.   

       

     II   

It was a day of cold   

Raw silence, wind-blown   

Surplice and soutane:   

Rained-on, flower-laden    (50)

Coffin after coffin   

Seemed to float from the door   

Of the packed cathedral   

Like blossoms on slow water.   

The common funeral    (55)

Unrolled its swaddling band,   

Lapping, tightening   

Till we were braced and bound   

Like brothers in a ring.   

But he would not be held    (60)

At home by his own crowd   

Whatever threats were phoned,   

Whatever black flags waved.   

I see him as he turned   

In that bombed offending place,    (65)

Remorse fused with terror   

In his still knowable face,   

His cornered outfaced stare   

Blinding in the flash.   

He had gone miles away    (70)

For he drank like a fish   

Nightly, naturally   

Swimming towards the lure   

Of warm lit-up places,   

The blurred mesh and murmur    (75)

Drifting among glasses   

In the gregarious smoke.   

How culpable was he   

That last night when he broke   

Our tribe’s complicity?    (80)

‘Now, you’re supposed to be   

An educated man,’   

I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me   

The right answer to that one.’

         

 

  III   

I missed his funeral, (85)   

Those quiet walkers   

And sideways talkers   

Shoaling out of his lane   

To the respectable   

Purring of the hearse...    (90)

They move in equal pace   

With the habitual   

Slow consolation   

Of a dawdling engine,   

The line lifted, hand    (95)

Over fist, cold sunshine   

On the water, the land   

Banked under fog: that morning   

I was taken in his boat,   

The screw purling, turning    (100)

Indolent fathoms white,   

I tasted freedom with him.   

To get out early, haul   

Steadily off the bottom,   

Dispraise the catch, and smile    (105)

As you find a rhythm   

Working you, slow mile by mile,   

Into your proper haunt   

Somewhere, well out, beyond...   

Dawn-sniffing revenant,    (110)

Plodder through midnight rain,   

Question me again.

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“Chicago” – Carl Sandburg

     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: (5)

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 (10)

     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 (15)

     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 (20)

     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, (25)

          Shoveling,

          Wrecking,

          Planning,

          Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with (30)

     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, (35)

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 (40)

     Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with

     Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

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“Daddy” - Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. (5)

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal (10)

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du. (15)

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend (20)

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw. (25)

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene (30)

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew. (40)

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew. (45)

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- (50)

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you. (55)

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who (60)

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do. (65)

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look (70)

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through. (75)

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now. (80)

There's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. (90) 12 October 1962

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“Diving into the Wreck” – Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber (5)

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team (10)

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently (15)

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it is a piece of maritime floss (20)

some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light (25)

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder (30)

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then (35)

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power (40)

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for (45)

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides (50)

you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done (55)

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed (60)

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun (65)

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters. (70)

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently

about the wreck (75)

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies (80)

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log (85)

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene (90)

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear

(1974)

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“Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight” by Dylan Thomas

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 5

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, 10

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. 15

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.

(1951)

[pic]

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. (5)

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, (10)

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago (15)

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea. (20)

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, (25)

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems (30)

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain (35)

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

“Elegy for Jane”

(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind, (5)

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,

And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth, (10)

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw,

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow. (15)

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: (20)

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover. (1970)

[pic]

“i sing of Olaf glad and big” by e. e. cummings

i sing of Olaf glad and big

whose warmest heart recoiled at war:

a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig

westpointer most succinctly bred) (5)

took erring Olaf soon in hand;

but--though an host of overjoyed

noncoms(first knocking on the head

him)do through icy waters roll

that helplessness which others stroke (10)

with brushes recently employed

anent this muddy toiletbowl,

while kindred intellects evoke

allegiance per blunt instruments--

Olaf(being to all intents (15)

a corpse and wanting any rag

upon what God unto him gave)

responds,without getting annoyed

"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave

(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers

(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)

their passive prey did kick and curse

until for wear their clarion (25)

voices and boots were much the worse,

and egged the firstclassprivates on

his rectum wickedly to tease

by means of skilfully applied

bayonets roasted hot with heat-- (30)

Olaf(upon what were once knees)

does almost ceaselessly repeat

"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which

assertions duly notified (35)

threw the yellowsonofabitch

into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)

i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because (40)

unless statistics lie he was

more brave than me:more blond than you. (1931)

[pic]

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

“If I Could Tell You”

Time will say nothing but I told you so,

Time only knows the price we have to pay;

If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,

If we should stumble when musicians play, (5)

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,

Because I love you more than I can say,

If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, (10)

There must be reasons why the leaves decay;

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,

The vision seriously intends to stay;

If I could tell you I would let you know. (15)

Suppose all the lions get up and go,

And all the brooks and soldiers run away;

Will Time say nothing but I told you so?

If I could tell you I would let you know.

(1940)

[pic]

“It’s a Woman’s World” Eavan Boland

Our way of life

has hardly changed

since a wheel first

whetted a knife.

Maybe flame (5)

burns more greedily

and wheels are steadier,

but we're the same:

we milestone (10)

our lives

with oversights,

living by the lights

of the loaf left

by the cash register, (15)

the washing powder

paid for and wrapped,

the wash left wet:

like most historic peoples

we are defined (20)

by what we forget

and what we never will be:

star-gazers,

fire-eaters.

It's our alibi (25)

for all time:

as far as history goes

we were never

on the scene of the crime.

When the king's head (30)

gored its basket,

grim harvest,

we were gristing bread

or getting the recipe

for a good soup. (35)

It's still the same:

our windows

moth our children

to the flame

of hearth not history. (40)

And still no page

scores the low music

of our outrage.

Appearances reassure:

that woman there, (45)

craned to

the starry mystery,

is merely getting a breath

of evening air.

While this one here, (50)

her mouth a burning plume -

she's no fire-eater,

just my frosty neighbour

coming home.

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Elizabeth Bishop

“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 5

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or 10

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. 15

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

[pic]

“Pike” by Ted Hughes

Pike, three inches long, perfect

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur, (5)

Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

Of submarine delicacy and horror.

A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-

Gloom of their stillness: (10)

Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.

Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs

Not to be changed at this date:

A life subdued to its instrument; (15)

The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,

Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

And four and a half: red fry to them-

Suddenly there were two. Finally one (20)

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

And indeed they spare nobody.

Two, six pounds each, over two feet long

High and dry and dead in the willow-herb- (25)

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:

The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-

The same iron in this eye

Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across, (30)

Whose lilies and muscular tench

Had outlasted every visible stone

Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:

It was as deep as England. It held (35)

Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished

With the hair frozen on my head

For what might move, for what eye might move. (40)

The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods

Frail on my ear against the dream

Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,

That rose slowly toward me, watching. (45)

[pic]

“Recuerdo” – Edna St. Vincent Millay

    WE were very tired, we were very merry—

    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

    It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—

    But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,

    We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; (5)

    And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

    We were very tired, we were very merry—

    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;

    And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,

    From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; (10)

    And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,

    And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

    We were very tired, we were very merry,

    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

    We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head, (15)

    And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;

    And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,

    And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

[pic]

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

“Skunk Hour”

For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island's hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son's a bishop. Her farmer

is first selectman in our village, (5)

she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victoria's century,

she buys up all (10)

the eyesores facing her shore,

and lets them fall.

The season's ill--

we've lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean (15)

catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall, (20)

his fishnet's filled with orange cork,

orange, his cobbler's bench and awl,

there is no money in his work,

he'd rather marry.

One dark night, (25)

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .

My mind's not right. (30)

A car radio bleats,

'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat . . . .

I myself am hell, (35)

nobody's here--

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire (40)

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- (45)

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the

garbage pail

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare. (50)

(1959)

[pic]

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

“The Road Not Taken”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; (5)

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, (10)

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. (15)

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. (20)

(1916)

[pic]

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

“The Weary Blues”

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

      I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light (5)

      He did a lazy sway. . . .

      He did a lazy sway. . . .

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody. (10)

      O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

      Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man’s soul. (15)

      O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—

      “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,

      Ain’t got nobody but ma self. (20)

      I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’

      And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more—

      “I got the Weary Blues (25)

      And I can’t be satisfied.

      Got the Weary Blues

      And can’t be satisfied—

      I ain’t happy no mo’

      And I wish that I had died.” (30)

And far into the night he crooned that tune.

The stars went out and so did the moon.

The singer stopped playing and went to bed

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead. (1926)

[pic]

(2 Poems for this poet – see next page)

“We Wear the Mask” Paul Lawrence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties. (5)

Why should the world be overwise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries (10)

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask! (15)

(1895)

“Sympathy” - Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, (5)

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--

I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

For he must fly back to his perch and cling (10)

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars

And they pulse again with a keener sting--

I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, (15)

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings-- (20)

I know why the caged bird sings!

[pic]

What Were They Like? – Denise Levertov

Did the people of Viet Nam

use lanterns of stone?

Did they hold ceremonies

to reverence the opening of buds?

Were they inclined to quiet laughter? (5)

Did they use bone and ivory,

jade and silver, for ornament?

Had they an epic poem?

Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone. (10)

It is not remembered whether in gardens

stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.

Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,

but after their children were killed

there were no more buds. (15)

Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.

A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.

All the bones were charred.

it is not remembered. Remember,

most were peasants; their life (20)

was in rice and bamboo.

When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies

and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,

maybe fathers told their sons old tales.

When bombs smashed those mirrors (25)

there was time only to scream.

There is an echo yet

of their speech which was like a song.

It was reported their singing resembled

the flight of moths in moonlight. (30)

Who can say? It is silent now.

[pic]

John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,

E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide,

Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present 5

My true account, least he returning chide,

Doth God exact day labour, light deny'd,

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 10

Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and waite.

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