The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry Read online

Goodbye, Walter de la Mare

  Death Be Not Proud

  The Last Invocation, Walt Whitman

  All the world's a stage, William Shakespeare

  Requiescat, Oscar Wilde

  With rue my heart is laden, A. E. Housman

  Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,

  Dylan Thomas

  The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Wallace Stevens

  Stop all the clocks, W. H. Auden

  Break, break, break, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter,

  John Crowe Ransom

  O Captain! My Captain!, Walt Whitman

  Punishment, Seamus Heaney

  Elegy for Jane, Theodore Roethke

  To an Athlete Dying Young, A. E. Housman

  Is My Team Plowing?, A. E. Housman

  Crossing the Bar, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Music, George du Maurier

  Prospice, Robert Browning

  Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

  After great pain, a formal feeling comes,

  Emily Dickinson

  Because I could not stop for Death, Emily Dickinson

  Question, May Swenson

  I strove with none, Walter Savage Landor

  When I Am Dead, Christina Rossetti

  Remember, Christina Rossetti

  Invocation, Helene Johnson

  when god lets my body be, e. e. cummings

  The Rebel, Mari Evans

  Death be not proud, John Donne

  Madrigal, William Drummond

  Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson

  And Death Shall Have No Dominion,

  Dylan Thomas

  Our revels now are ended, William Shakespeare

  Acknowledgments

  Author Index

  Title Index

  About the Editor

  Great poetry is personal. Like a seashell held to your ear, a poem resonates to the beating of your heart, matching the design of its inner chamber to the contours of your mind. The poet brings the words, you bring your life and together you make the song. The stories of great poetry are familiar. Constructed from the culture and the symbols the writer and reader have in common, a poem can present a personal experience so truthfully that it is not read, as Robert Frost said, so much as it is recognized. The account of life it offers can be so accurate and self-effacing that it becomes our own, informing our memory, extending our vision and clarifying our thoughts. We find our feelings given voice. We get involved.

  The language of great poetry, too, is like our own. It invites us in. All poems capture thought in a rhythmic narrative that is easy to remember, and to that extent poetry is little more than a device, a chant, a mantra, a prayer. But the rhythms employed in great poetry are more intimate: the studied stride of formal speech, the monotones of madness, the quiet sighing of despair, the blurting out of love. And through image, irony and symbolism the message is structured to turn on us in surprise like life itself. While the syntax may be as difficult to parse as a midnight thought, great poetry breaks through to a higher grammar of ideas and feelings. Let go of the rhyme and listen. Modern verse in particular speaks as we do, using the power of plain words, searing and unadorned.

  Too often, though, in our efforts to understand and discuss it with others, we hold poetry at arms length, concentrating on it as a cultural specimen or a puzzle to be solved: here the poet reveals her neurosis; there the stain of his times shows through. We shine a light into the poet’s eyes: what exactly did you mean by that? Yes, it deepens our understanding to know a little about the circumstances in which the poem was written. Friends often ask that kind of knowledge of each other. And, yes, we must sometimes enter into a poem’s strangeness, however discomforting and difficult the lesson may be. Our closest friends, too, can be demanding and obscure. But great poetry should be held up close. It is often your life and not the poet’s that gives the language meaning. The great poems are usually about you.

  Is it dangerous to get so personally involved? Poetry takes your mind off the job; it raises questions; it gets your blood boiling. Even Plato banished poetry from his Republic because it might encourage troublesome ideas that were in conflict with official doctrine. Aristotle replied that it should be permitted to continue because it can be made instructive and of service to the State. But both seem equally wrong. Poetry is no servant, it is another regime, a parliament of ideas in permanent session, still working its colorful and circuitous way through the whereases. Poetry has been banished a thousand times and we still have poetry. States rise and preen and march and have their day, and it is poetry that survives. It is in poetry, not on the Senate floor, that we debate the issues of honor, loyalty, love and respect for nature that are the foundations of our society. Poetry is a truth toward which our reason turns and we measure its strength by the way we feel.

  The aim of this anthology has been to re-emphasize the personal aspect of poetry, to select from 500 years of American and English literature several hundred of the best and most evocative poems and to put them in a small book that can be carried in a suitcase or chucked into the glove compartment. That is the way poetry is supposed to work. Not included here are long masterpieces like T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Others like Whitman's "Song of Myself" are represented only by excerpts. A few poems have been chosen to serve as foils for others and one selection by Dylan Thomas is not a poem at all but part of a short story. Generous helpings have been taken from Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg who have been inexplicably neglected in these post-modern times. But with such eccentricities acknowledged, the great poems are here. Although there was no intention to be representative, half the poems are by Americans and half by English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Canadians. There are translations from Middle English, Sanskrit, Russian, Bengali and Japanese. And it is modern: a third of the poems in this anthology were written in the last fifty years and a third were written between 1900 and 1945. The date given in each case is the date of first publication unless an earlier date of composition is known.

  Finally, they have been arranged by subject. Great poems can be read this way. They transcend style; they speak beyond their time; they sing together and in counterpoint, given half a chance. Denise Levertov and Mitchell Goodman, for example, were married, and their poems about the ache of it appear here side by side. Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were friends while Frost was living in England; their poems about the dark forest are here together. (Thomas died in the first world war, and Frost continued to be obsessed by this theme throughout his life.) Poets as diverse as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Sara Teasdale and Gary Snyder echo the themes and images of "Western Wind" hundreds of years later as if it were some universal subtext to which we all return. Maya Angelou and Jane Flanders, like talk show guests sitting on stools, swap stories about their mothers. Separated by more than a century, Robert Browning and Richard Wilbur talk about how men look at women. Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg call back and forth to each other about the America each has found, and between the surreal rage of W. D. Snodgrass' "Examination" and the irony of Auden's "Unknown Citizen", Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" can be seen for the sad, cynical tale it is, as if, against the harsh light of the others' anger, we could trace its awful bones. The poems follow the contours of life, the loneliness of the artist, the uses of war, the role of nature, the constancy of love and the coming on of death.

  This is the singing of our tribe, called out across the noisy business of daily life. Take it personally. Sample these poems in a generous spirit, prepared to hear your own heart roaring in your ear.

  Christopher Burns

  To the Reader

  As you read, a white bear leisurely

  pees, dyeing the snow

  saffron,

  and as you read, many gods

  lie among the lianas: eyes of obsidian

  are watching the generations of leaves,

  and as you read

&nb
sp; the sea is turning its dark pages,

  turning

  its dark pages.

  Denise Levertov, 1961

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Johnson J

  The Creation

  And God stepped out on space,

  And He looked around and said,

  "I'm lonely.

  I'll make me a world."

  And far as the eye of God could see

  Darkness covered everything,

  Blacker than a hundred midnights

  Down in a cypress swamp.

  Then God smiled,

  And the light broke,

  And the darkness rolled up on one side,

  And the light stood shining on the other,

  And God said, "That's good!"

  Then God reached out and took the light

  in His hands,

  And God rolled the light around in His hands

  Until He made the sun;

  And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.

  And the light that was left from making the sun

  God gathered it up in a shining ball

  And flung it against the darkness,

  Spangling the night with the moon and stars.

  Then down between

  The darkness and the light

  He hurled the world;

  And God said, "That's good!"

  Then God himself stepped down.

  And the sun was on His right hand,

  And the moon was on His left;

  The stars were clustered about His head,

  And the earth was under His feet.

  And God walked, and where He trod

  His footsteps hollowed the valleys out

  And bulged the mountains up.

  Then He stopped and looked and saw

  That the earth was hot and barren.

  So God stepped over to the edge of the world

  And He spat out the seven seas—

  He batted His eyes, and the lightning flashed;

  He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;

  And the waters above the earth came down,

  The cooling waters came down.

  Then the green grass sprouted,

  And the little red flowers blossomed,

  The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,

  And the oak spread out his arms,

  The lakes cuddled down in the hollows

  of the ground,

  And the rivers ran down to the sea;

  And God smiled again,

  And the rainbow appeared,

  And curled itself around His shoulder.

  Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand

  Over the sea and over the land,

  And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"

  And quicker than God could drop His hand.

  Fishes and fowls

  And beasts and birds

  Swam the rivers and the seas,

  Roamed the forests and the woods,

  And split the air with their wings.

  And God said, "That's good!"

  Then God walked around,

  And God looked around

  On all that He had made.

  He looked at His sun,

  And He looked at His moon,

  And He looked at His little stars;

  He looked on His world

  With all its living things,

  And God said, "I'm lonely still."

  Then God sat down

  On the side of a hill where He could think;

  By a deep, wide river He sat down;

  With His head in His hands,

  God thought and thought,

  Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"

  Up from the bed of the river

  God scooped the clay;

  And by the bank of the river

  He kneeled Him down;

  And there the great God Almighty

  Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,

  Who flung the stars to the most far corner

  of the night,

  Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;

  This Great God,

  Like a mammy bending over her baby,

  Kneeled down in the dust

  Toiling over a lump of clay

  Till He shaped it in His own image;

  Then into it He blew the breath of life,

  And man became a living soul.

  Amen. Amen.

  James Weldon Johnson, 1919

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Sandburg

  They Ask: Is God, Too, Lonely?

  When God scooped up a handful of dust,

  And spit on it, and molded the shape of man,

  And blew a breath into it and told it to walk—

  That was a great day.

  And did God do this because He was lonely?

  Did God say to Himself he must have company

  And therefore He would make man to walk

  the earth

  And set apart churches for speech and song

  with God?

  These are questions.

  They are scrawled in old caves.

  They are painted in tall cathedrals.

  There are men and women so lonely they believe

  God, too, is lonely.

  Carl Sandburg, 1928

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Sexton

  The Earth

  God loafs around heaven,

  without a shape

  but He would like to smoke His cigar

  or bite His fingernails

  and so forth.

  God owns heaven

  but He craves the earth,

  the earth with its little sleepy caves,

  its bird resting at the kitchen window,

  even its murders lined up like broken chairs,

  even its writers digging into their souls

  with jackhammers,

  even its hucksters selling their animals

  for gold,

  even its babies sniffing for their music,

  the farm house, white as a bone,

  sitting in the lap of its corn,

  even the statue holding up its widowed life,

  even the ocean with its cupful of students,

  but most of all He envies the bodies,

  He who has no body.

  The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes

  and never forgetting, recording by thousands,

  the skull with its brains like eels—

  the tablet of the world—

  the bones and their joints

  that build and the break for any trick,

  the genitals,

  the ballast of the eternal,

  and the heart, of course,

  that swallows the tides

  and spits them out cleansed.

  He does not envy the soul so much.

  He is all soul

  but He would like to house it in a body

  and come down

  and give it a bath

  now and then.

  Anne Sexton, 1975

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Dickinson

  I dwell in possibility

  I dwell in possibility,

  A fairer house than prose,

  More numerous of windows—

  Superior for doors.

  Of chambers as the cedars,

  Impregnable of eye

  And for an everlasting roof

  The gambrels of the sky.

  Of visitors, the fairest

  For occupation, this—

  The spreading wide my narrow hands

  To gather paradise.

  Emily Dickinson, 1862

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Teasdale

  Song Making

  My heart cried like a beaten child

  Ceaselessly all night long;

  I had to take my own cries

  And thread them into a song.

  One was a cry at black midnight

  And one when the first cock crew—

&n
bsp; My heart was like a beaten child,

  But no one ever knew.

  Life, you have put me in your debt

  And I must serve you long—

  But oh, the debt is terrible

  That must be paid in song.

  Sara Teasdale, 1916

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Whitman

  One's-Self I Sing

  One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

  Yet utter the word Democratic, the word

  En-Masse.

  Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

  Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is

  worthy for the Muse,

  I say the Form complete is worthier far,

  The Female equally with the Male I sing.

  Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

  Cheerful, for freest action formed under the

  laws divine,

  The Modern Man I sing.

  Walt Whitman, 1871

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Dickinson

  God is indeed a jealous God

  God is indeed a jealous God

  He cannot bear to see

  That we had rather not with Him

  But with each other play.

  Emily Dickinson, c.1864

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Cullen

  Yet Do I Marvel

  I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

  And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

  The little buried mole continues blind,

  Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,

  Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

  Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

  If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

  To struggle up a never-ending stair.

  Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

  To catechism by a mind too strewn

  With petty cares to slightly understand

  What awful brain compels His awful hand.

  Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

  To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

  Countee Cullen, 1923