Great poems
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You and I Saw Hawks Exchanging the Prey
© James Wright
Smaller than she, he goes
Claw beneath claw beneath
Needles and leaning boughs,
Modern Love: XVI
© George Meredith
In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,
When in the firelight steadily aglow,
Hellas: Chorus
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
Hotel François 1er
© Gertrude Stein
It was a very little while and they had gone in front of it. It was that they had liked it would it bear. It was a very much adjoined a follower. Flower of an adding where a follower.
Have I come in. Will in suggestion.
They may like hours in catching.
It is always a pleasure to remember.
The Bearer
© Hayden Carruth
Like all his people he felt at home in the forest.
The silence beneath great trees, the dimness there,
"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd"
© Walt Whitman
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travelld a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once lookd on you,
For I feard I might afterward lose you.
(I found a few old letters...)
© Anselm Hollo
XIV
I found a few old letters of mine carefully hidden in thy boxa few small toys for thy memory to play with. With a timorous heart thou didst try to steal these trifles from the turbulent stream of time which washes away planets and stars, and didst say, These are only mine! Alas, there is no one now who can claim themwho is able to pay their price; yet they are still here. Is there no love in this world to rescue thee from utter loss, even like this love of thine that saved these letters with such fond care?
O woman, thou camest for a moment to my side and touched me with the great mystery of the woman that there is in the heart of creationshe who ever gives back to God his own outflow of sweetness; who is the eternal love and beauty and youth; who dances in bubbling streams and sings in the morning light; who with heaving waves suckles the thirsty earth and whose mercy melts in rain; in whom the eternal one breaks in two in joy that can contain itself no more and overflows in the pain of love.
The School Where I Studied
© John Wesley
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
© Geoffrey Hill
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.
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.
Rivers and Mountains
© John Ashbery
On the secret map the assassins
Cloistered, the Moon River was marked
Mother and Child
© Louise Gluck
This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
Sapphics
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.
Mechanism
© Archie Randolph Ammons
Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
morality: any working order,
Listening
© David Ignatow
You wept in your mother's arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.
Shroud of the Gnome
© James Tate
And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions
surprise or interest him, even a little. I tell him
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
© Charles Bukowski
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein’s
