Failure poems
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A Grammarian's Funeral Shortly After The Revival Of Learning
© Robert Browning
Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
My Soul Is Marching On!
© Paramahansa Yogananda
The shining stars are sunk in darkness deep,
The weary sun is dead at night,
The moons soft smile doth fade anon;
But still my soul is marching on!
Eyewash
© Niall Montgomery
EYES always open eyes
onions we were all found under
eyes never in a hurry wait for me
blink at the smash preserve the negative hold on a minute
(we are taking actuality as a section through sentiment at that point)
Four Quartets 2: East Coker
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
M'Fingal - Canto III
© John Trumbull
By this, M'Fingal with his train
Advanced upon th' adjacent plain,
And full with loyalty possest,
Pour'd forth the zeal, that fired his breast.
M'Fingal - Canto II
© John Trumbull
"T' evade these crimes of blackest grain
You prate of liberty in vain,
And strive to hide your vile designs
In terms abstruse, like school-divines.
nobody loses all the time (X)
© Edward Estlin Cummings
i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle
Carol of Words.
© Walt Whitman
1
EARTH, round, rolling, compactsuns, moons, animalsall these are words to be
said;
Watery, vegetable, sauroid advancesbeings, premonitions, lispings of the future,
To a foild European Revolutionaire.
© Walt Whitman
1
COURAGE yet! my brother or my sister!
Keep on! Liberty is to be subservd, whatever occurs;
That is nothing, that is quelld by one or two failures, or any number of failures,
Feb. 29, 1958
© Allen Ginsberg
Last nite I dreamed of T.S. Eliot
welcoming me to the land of dream
Sofas couches fog in England
Tea in his digs Chelsea rainbows
New Year's Eve
© Henry Van Dyke
I The other night I had a dream, most clear
And comforting, complete
In every line, a crystal sphere,
And full of intimate and secret cheer.
Apologia
© Oscar Wilde
Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?
Hiawathas' photographing ( Part III )
© Lewis Carroll
Next the Son, the Stunning-Cantab:
He suggested curves of beauty,
Curves pervading all his figure,
Which the eye might follow onward,
Hiawatha's Photographing (complete)
© Lewis Carroll
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
Tho Lack of Laurels and of Wreaths Not One
© Trumbull Stickney
Tho lack of laurels and of wreaths not one
Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet
At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
© Larry Levis
I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover
From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now,
Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled,
Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out
Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A.
Lincoln
© Delmore Schwartz
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
