The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry Read online

  The rushing amorous contact high in space

  together,

  The clinching, interlocking claws, a living,

  fierce, gyrating wheel,

  Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass

  tight grappling,

  In tumbling, turning, clustering hoops,

  straight downward falling,

  Till o'er the river poised, the twain yet one,

  a moment's lull,

  A motionless still balance in the air, then parting,

  talons loosing,

  Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting,

  their separate diverse flight,

  She hers, he his, pursuing.

  Walt Whitman, 1880

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Jeffers

  Vulture

  I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest

  on a bare hillside

  Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids

  a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,

  And presently it passed again, but lower and

  nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then

  That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and

  heard the flight-feathers

  Whistle above me and make their circle and

  come nearer.

  I could see the naked red head between the

  great wings

  Bear downward staring. I said, "My dear bird,

  we are wasting time here.

  These old bones will still work; they are not

  for you." But how beautiful he'd looked,

  gliding down

  On those great sails; how beautiful he looked,

  veering away in the sea-light over the

  precipice. I tell you solemnly

  That I was sorry to have disappointed him.

  To be eaten by that beak and become part

  of him, to share those wings and those eyes—

  What a sublime end of one's body, what an

  enskyment; what a life after death.

  Robinson Jeffers, 1962

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Jeffers

  Hurt Hawks

  1

  The broken pillar of the wing jags from the

  clotted shoulder,

  The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

  No more to use the sky forever but live

  with famine

  And pain a few days: cat nor coyote

  Will shorten the week of waiting for death,

  there is game without talons.

  He stands under the oak-bush and waits

  The lame feet of salvation; at night he

  remembers freedom

  And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

  He is strong and pain is worse to the strong,

  incapacity is worse.

  The curs of the day come and torment him

  At distance, no one but death the redeemer

  will humble that head,

  The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

  The wild God of the world is sometimes

  merciful to those

  That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

  You do not know him, you communal people,

  or you have forgotten him;

  Intemperate and savage, the hawk

  remembers him;

  Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that

  are dying, remember him.

  2

  I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than

  a hawk; but the great redtail

  Had nothing left but unable misery

  From the bone too shattered for mending,

  the wing that trailed under his talons when

  he moved.

  We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

  He wandered over the foreland hill and returned

  in the evening, asking for death,

  Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

  Implacable arrogance.

  I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.

  What fell was relaxed. Owl-downy, soft feminine

  feathers; but what

  Soared: the fierce rush: the night herons by the

  flooded river cried fear at its rising

  Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

  Robinson Jeffers, 1924

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Millay

  God's World

  O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

  Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!

  Thy mists that roll and rise!

  Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag

  And all but cry with color! That gaunt crag

  To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!

  World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

  Long have I known a glory in it all,

  But never knew I this:

  Here such a passion is

  As stretcheth me apart—Lord, I do fear

  Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;

  My soul is all but out of me—let fall

  No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1913

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Millay

  Spring

  To what purpose, April, do you return again?

  Beauty is not enough.

  You can no longer quiet me with the redness

  Of little leaves opening stickily.

  I know what I know.

  The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

  The spikes of the crocus.

  The smell of the earth is good.

  It is apparent that there is no death.

  But what does that signify?

  Not only under ground are the brains of men

  Eaten by maggots.

  Life in itself

  Is nothing,

  An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

  It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

  April

  Comes like an idiot, babbling and

  strewing flowers.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Hopkins

  Pied Beauty

  Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout

  that swim;

  Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow,

  and plow;

  And áll trádes, their gear and tackle

  and trim.

  All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle,

  dim;

  He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

  Praise Him.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Hopkins

  Inversnaid

  This darksome burn, horseback brown,

  His rollrock highroad roaring down,

  In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

  Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

  A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth

  Turns and twindles over the broth

  Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,

  It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

  Degged with dew, dappled with dew

  Are the groins of the braes that the brook

  treads through,

  Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

  And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

  What would the world be, once bereft

  Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

  O let them be left, wildness and wet;

  Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1881

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Wilbur

  Love Calls
Us to the Things of

  This World

  The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

  And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

  Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

  As false dawn.

  Outside the open window

  The morning air is all awash with angels.

  Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

  Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

  Now they are rising together in calm swells

  Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

  With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

  Now they are flying in place, conveying

  The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

  And staying like white water; and now

  of a sudden

  They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

  That nobody seems to be there.

  The soul shrinks

  From all that it is about to remember,

  From the punctual rape of every blessed day,

  And cries,

  "Oh, let there be nothing on earth

  but laundry,

  Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

  And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

  Yet, as the sun acknowledges

  With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,

  The soul descends once more in bitter love

  To accept the waking body, saying now

  In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

  "Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

  Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

  Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

  And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

  Of dark habits,

  keeping their difficult balance."

  Richard Wilbur, 1956

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Lowell A

  Chinoiseries

  REFLECTIONS

  When I looked into your eyes,

  I saw a garden

  With peonies, and tinkling pagodas,

  And round-arched bridges

  Over still lakes.

  A woman sat beside the water

  In a rain-blue silken garment.

  She reached through the water

  To pluck the crimson peonies

  Beneath the surface,

  But as she grasped the stems,

  They jarred and broke into

  white-green ripples;

  And as she drew out her hand,

  The water-drops dripping from it

  Stained her rain-blue dress like tears.

  FALLING SNOW

  The snow whispers about me,

  And my wooden clogs

  Leave holes behind me in the snow.

  But no one will pass this way

  Seeking my footsteps,

  And when the temple bell rings again

  They will be covered and gone.

  HOAR-FROST

  In the cloud-gray mornings

  I heard the herons flying;

  And when I came into my garden,

  My silken outer garment

  Trailed over withered leaves.

  A dried leaf crumbles at a touch,

  But I have seen many Autumns

  With herons blowing like smoke

  Across the sky.

  Amy Lowell, 1919

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Thomas

  Fern Hill

  Now as I was young and easy

  under the apple boughs

  About the lilting house and happy as the

  grass was green,

  The night above the dingle starry,

  Time let me hail and climb

  Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

  And honored among wagons

  I was prince of the apple towns

  And once below a time I lordly had

  the trees and leaves

  Trail with daisies and barley

  Down the rivers of the windfall light.

  And as I was green and carefree,

  famous among the barns

  About the happy yard and singing

  as the farm was home,

  In the sun that is young once only,

  Time let me play and be

  Golden in the mercy of his means,

  And green and golden I was huntsman

  and herdsman, the calves

  Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills

  barked clear and cold,

  And the sabbath rang slowly

  In the pebbles of the holy streams.

  All the sun long it was running,

  it was lovely, the hay

  Fields high as the house, the tunes

  from the chimneys, it was air

  And playing, lovely and watery

  And fire green as grass.

  And nightly under the simple stars

  As I rode to sleep the owls were

  bearing the farm away,

  All the moon long I heard, blessed among

  stables, the nightjars

  Flying with the ricks, and the horses

  Flashing into the dark.

  And then to awake, and the farm,

  like a wanderer white

  With the dew, come back,

  the cock on his shoulder: it was all

  Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

  The sky gathered again

  And the sun grew round that very day.

  So it must have been after the

  birth of the simple light

  In the first, spinning place,

  the spellbound horses walking warm

  Out of the whinnying green stable

  On to the fields of praise.

  And honored among foxes

  and pheasants by the gay house

  Under the new made clouds

  and happy as the heart was long,

  In the sun born over and over,

  I ran my heedless ways,

  My wishes raced through the house high hay

  And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades,

  that time allows

  In all his tuneful turning so few

  and such morning songs

  Before the children green and golden

  Follow him out of grace,

  Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days,

  that time would take me

  Up to the swallow thronged loft

  by the shadow of my hand,

  In the moon that is always rising,

  Nor that riding to sleep

  I should hear him fly with the high fields

  And wake to the farm forever

  fled from the childless land.

  Oh as I was young and easy

  in the mercy of his means,

  Time held me green and dying

  Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

  Dylan Thomas, 1945

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Wylie

  Puritan Sonnet

  from "Wild Peaches"

  There's something in this richness that I hate.

  I love the look, austere, immaculate,

  Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.

  There's something in my very blood that owns

  Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,

  A thread of water, churned to milky spate

  Streaming through slanted pastures fenced

  with stones.

  I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,

  Those fields sparse-planted, rendering

  meager sheaves;

  That spring, briefer than apple-blossom's breath,

  Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,

  Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,

  And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

  Elinor Wylie, 1921

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Sandburg

  Fog

  The fog comes

  on little cat feet.
<
br />   It sits looking

  over harbor and city

  on silent haunches

  and then moves on.

  Carl Sandburg, 1916

  Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Shelley

  The Waning Moon

  And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

  Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,

  Out of her chamber, led by the insane

  And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

  The moon arose up in the murky East

  A white and shapeless mass.

  Art thou pale for weariness

  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

  Wandering companionless

  Among the stars that have a different birth,

  And ever changing, like a joyless eye

  That finds no object worth its constancy?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820

  Next | TOC> What Lips My Lips> Yeats

  Politics

  In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning

  in political terms.

  —Thomas Mann

  How can I, that girl standing there,

  My attention fix

  On Roman or on Russian

  Or on Spanish politics?

  Yet here's a traveled man that knows

  What he talks about,

  And there's a politician

  That has read and thought,

  And maybe what they say is true

  Of war and war's alarms,

  But O that I were young again

  And held her in my arms!

  William Butler Yeats, 1939

  Next | TOC> What Lips My Lips> Roethke

  I Knew a Woman

  I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

  When small birds sighed, she would sigh

  back at them;

  Ah, when she moved, she moved

  more ways than one:

  The shapes a bright container can contain!

  Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,

  Or English poets who grew up on Greek

  (I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

  How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,

  She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn,

  and Stand;

  She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;

  I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;