|
Dickinson
[49]
"I never lost as much but twice,"
|
"Burglar! Banker-- Father!"
|
|
|
Dickinson
[79]
"Exultation is the going"
|
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses—past the headlands—
Into deep Eternity—
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?"
[entire poem]
Trochaic
|
|
|
Dickinson
[130]
"These are the days when Birds come back --
|
A very few—a Bird or two—
To take a backward look.
These are the days when skies resume
The old—old sophistries of June—
A blue and gold mistake.
[...]
Last Communion in the the Haze --"
[first stanza and excerpt]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[214]
"I taste a liquor never brewed --
|
From Tankards scooped in Pearl—
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!"
[first stanza]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[241]
"I like a look of Agony,
|
Because I know it's true --
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe --
The Eyes glaze once -- and that is Death --
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung."
[entire poem]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[258]
"There's a certain Slant of light,"
|
"When it comes, the Landscape listens -- /
Shadows -- hold their breath -- /
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance /
On the look of Death --"
[excerpt]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[280]
"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
|
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—"
[...]
"As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here --"
[first stanza and excerpt]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[290]
"Of Bronze -- and Blaze --
|
The North -- Tonight --
So adequate -- it forms --
So preconcerted with itself --
So distant -- to alarms --"
[first stanza]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[341]
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
|
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --
This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --"
[entire poem]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[401]
"What Soft -- Cherubic Creatures --"
|
"A Horror so refined"
[excerpt]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[435]
"Much Madness is divinest Sense --
|
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail --
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --
And handled with a Chain --"
[entire poem]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[448]
"This was a Poet -- It is That
|
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings --
And Attar so immense"
[first stanza]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[449]
"I died for Beauty -- but was scarce"
|
"And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night --
We talked between the Rooms --
Until the Moss had reached our lips --
And covered up -- our names --"
[last stanza]
|
|
|
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 mackeral-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.
[first stanza]
[1928]
|
|
|
Yeats
To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time
|
I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.
[last lines]
[1893]
|
|
|
Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
|
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
[entire poem]
[1893]
|
|
|
Yeats
to Ireland in the Coming Times
|
Ah, faerics, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth’s consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
[excerpt]
[1893]
|
|
|
Yeats
Adam's Curse
|
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
[last lines]
[1904]
|
|
|
Yeats
No Second Troy
|
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
[entire poem]
[1910]
|
|
|
Yeats
September 1913
|
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
[first stanza]
[1914]
|
|
|
Yeats
A Coat
|
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
[entire poem]
[1914]
|
|
|
Yeats
The Fisherman
|
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, ‘Before I am old
I shall have written him one
poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.’
[last lines]
[1919]
|
|
|
Yeats
Easter 1916
|
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
[excerpt, repeated 3 times with minor variation]
[1921]
|
|
|
Yeats
In Memory of Major Robert Gregory
|
Some burn dam faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As ’twere all life’s epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?
[Stanza XI]
[1919]
|
|
|
Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
|
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
[fourth of five stanzas]
[1919]
|
|
|
Yeats
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
|
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
[last lines]
[1919]
|
|
|
Yeats
The Second Coming
|
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
[first stanza]
[1921]
|
|
|
Yeats
A Prayer For My Daughter
|
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
[excerpt]
[1921]
|
|
|
Yeats
The Tower
|
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet’s imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman,
Mirror-resembling dream.
[excerpt]
[1928]
|
|
|
Yeats
Among School Children
|
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age—
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage—
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
[...]
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
[...]
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
[last couplet]
[1928]
|
|
|
Yeats
Byzantium
|
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
[first stanza]
Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
[last stanza]
[1933]
|
|
|
Yeats
Ego Dominus Tuus
|
Hic. And yet
No one denies to Keats love of the world;
Remember his deliberate happiness.
Ille. His art is happy, but who knows his mind?
I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made - being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper—
Luxuriant song.
[excerpt]
[1919]
|
|
|
Yeats
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
|
‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
[last stanza]
[1933]
|
|
|
Yeats
Lapis Lazuli
|
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
[last stanza]
[1938]
|
|
|
Yeats
The Circus Animals' Desertion
|
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
[last lines]
[1939]
|
|
|
Yeats
Under Ben Bulben
|
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
[last lines]
[1939]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[449]
"I died for Beauty—but was scarce
|
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room—"
|
|
|
Dickinson
[465]
"I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
|
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—"
|
|
|
Dickinson
[508]
"I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs—
|
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading—too—"
[first stanza]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[564]
"My period had come for Prayer—"
|
"Unbroken by a Settler—
Were all that I could see—
Infinitude—Had’st Thou no Face
That I might look on Thee?"
[excerpt]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[569]
"I reckon—when I count it all—
|
First—Poets—Then the Sun—
Then Summer—Then the Heaven of God—
And then—the List is done—"
[first stanza]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[585]
"I like to see it lap the Miles—
|
And lick the Valleys up—
And stop to feed itself at Tanks—
And then—prodigious step"
|
|
|
Dickinson
[640]
"I cannot live with You—
|
It would be Life—
And Life is over there—
Behind the Shelf"
|
|
|
Dickinson
[650]
"Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
|
It cannot recollect
When it begun -- or if there were
A time when it was not --
It has no Future -- but itself --
Its Infinite contain
Its Past -- enlightened to perceive
New Periods -- of Pain."
[entire poem]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[675]
"Essential Oils—are wrung—
|
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns—alone—
It is the gift of Screws—
The General Rose—decay—
But this—in Lady’s Drawer
Make Summer—When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary—"
[entire poem]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[712]
"Because I could not stop for Death—
|
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.
[...]
Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—"
|
|
|
Dickinson
[754]
"My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
|
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—
[...]
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—"
[first and last stanzas]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[985]
"The Missing All—prevented Me
|
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World’s
Departure from a Hinge—
Or Sun’s extinction, be observed—
’Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity."
[entire poem]
|
|
|
Dickinson
[986]
"A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
|
"But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—"
|
|
|
Dickinson
[1052]
"I never saw a Moor—
|
I never saw the Sea—
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be.
I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven—
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Checks were given—"
[entire poem]
|
|
