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What Is Poetry?
Poetry is as universal as language and almost as ancient. The most primitive peoples have used it, and
the most civilized have cultivated it. In all ages and in all countries, poetry has been written, and
eagerly read or listened to, by all kinds and conditions of people by soldiers, states-men, lawyers,
farmers, doctors, scientists, clergy, philosophers, kings, and queens. In all ages it has been especially
the concern of the educated, the intelligent, and the sensitive, and it has appealed, in its simpler forms,
to the uneducated and to children. Why? First, because it has given pleasure. People have read it,
listened to it, or recited it because they liked it because it gave them enjoyment. But this is not the
whole answer. Poetry in all ages has been regarded as important, not simply as one of several
alternative forms of amusement, as one person might choose bowling, another chess, and another
poetry. Rather, it has been regarded as something central to existence, something having unique value
to the fully realized life, something that we are better off for having and without which we are
spiritually impoverished. To understand the reasons for this, we need to have at least a provisional
understanding of what poetry is provisional, because people have always been more successful at
appreciating poetry than at defining it.
Initially, poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than
does ordinary language. To understand this fully, we need to understand what poetry says. For
language is employed on different occasions to say quite different kinds of things; in other words,
language has different uses.
Perhaps the commonest use of language is to communicate information. We say that it is nine oclock,
that we liked a certain movie, that George Washington was the first president of the United States, that
bromine and iodine are members of the halogen group of chemical elements. This we might call the
practical use of language; it helps us with the ordinary business of living.
But it is not primarily to communicate information that novels, short stories, plays, and poems are
written. These exist to bring us a sense and a perception of life, to widen and sharpen our contacts with
existence. Their concern is with experience. We all have an inner need to live more deeply and fully
and with greater awareness, to know the experience of others, and to understand our own experience
better. Poets, from their own store of felt, observed, or imagined experiences, select, combine, and
reorganize. They create significant new experiences for their readers significant because focused
and formed in which readers can participate and from which they may gain a greater awareness and
understanding of their world. Literature, in other words, can be used as a gear for stepping up the
intensity and increasing the range of our experience and as a glass for clarifying it. This is the literary
use of language, for literature is not only an aid to living but a means of living.
Suppose, for instance, that we are interested in eagles. If we want simply to acquire information about
eagles, we may turn to an encyclopedia or a book of natural history. There we find that the family
Falconidae, to which eagles belong, is characterized by imperforate nostrils, legs of medium length, a
hooked bill, the hind toe inserted on a level with the three front ones, and the claws roundly curved and
sharp; that land eagles are feathered to the toes and sea-fishing eagles halfway to the toes; that their
length is about three feet and their wingspan seven feet; that they usually build their nests on some
inaccessible cliff; that the eggs are spotted and do not exceed three; and perhaps that the eagles great
power of vision, the vast height to which it soars in the sky, the wild grandeur of its abode, have . . .
commended it to the poets of all nations.
But unless we are interested in this information only for practical purposes, we are likely to feel a little
disappointed, as though we had grasped the feathers of the eagle but not its soul. True, we have learned
many facts about the eagle, but we have missed somehow its lonely majesty, its power, and the wild
grandeur of its surroundings that would make the eagle a living creature rather than a mere museum
specimen. For the living eagle we must turn to literature.
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Poetry takes all life as its province. Its primary concern is not with beauty, not with philosophical truth,
not with persuasion, but with experience. Beauty and philosophical truth are aspects of experience, and
the poet is often engaged with them. But poetry as a whole is concerned with all kinds of experience
beautiful or ugly, strange or common, noble or ignoble, actual or imaginary. One of the paradoxes of
human existence is that all experience even painful experience is, for the good reader, enjoyable
when transmitted through the medium of art. In real life, death and pain and suffering are not
pleasurable, but in poetry they may be. In real life, getting soaked in a rainstorm is not pleasurable, but
in poetry it can be. In actual life, if we cry, usually we are unhappy; but if we cry in a movie, we are
manifestly enjoying it. We do not ordinarily like to be terrified in real life, but we sometimes seek
movies or books that will terrify us. We find some value in all intense living. To be intensely alive is
the opposite of being dead. To be dull, to be bored, to be imperceptive is in one sense to be dead.
Poetry comes to us bringing life and therefore pleasure. Moreover, art focuses and organizes experience
so as to give us a better understanding of it. And to understand life is partly to be master of it.
There is no sharp distinction between poetry and other forms of imaginative literature. Although some
beginning readers may believe that poetry can be recognized by the arrangement of its lines on the page
or by its use of rime and meter, such superficial signs are of little worth. The Book of Job in the Bible
and Melvilles Moby Dick are highly poetical, but the familiar verse that begins: Thirty days hath
September, I April, June, and November. . . is not. The difference between poetry and other literature
is one only of degree. Poetry is the most condensed and concentrated form of literature. It is language
whose individual lines, either because of their own brilliance or because they focus so powerfully what
has gone before, have a higher voltage than most language. It is language that grows frequently
incandescent, giving off both light and heat.
Ultimately, therefore, poetry can be recognized only by the response made to it by a good reader,
someone who has acquired some sensitivity to poetry. But there is a catch here. We are not all good
readers. To a poor reader, poetry will often seem dull and boring, a fancy way of writing something
that could be said more simply. So might a color-blind man deny that there is such a thing as color.
The act of communication involved in reading poetry is like the act of communication involved in
receiving a message by radio. Two devices are required: a transmitting station and a receiving set. The
complete-ness of the communication depends on both the power and clarity of the transmitter and the
sensitivity and tuning of the receiver. When a person reads a poem and no experience is received, either
the poem is not a good poem or the reader is a poor reader or not properly tuned. With new poetry, we
cannot always be sure which is at fault. With older poetry, if it has acquired critical acceptance has
been enjoyed by generations of good readers we may assume that the receiving set is at fault.
Fortunately, the fault is not irremediable. Though we cannot all become expert readers, we can become
good enough to find both pleasure and value in much good poetry, or we can increase the amount of
pleasure we already find in poetry and the number of kinds of poetry in which we find it. The purpose
of this book is to help you increase your sensitivity and range as a receiving set.
Poetry, finally, is a kind of multidimensional language. Ordinary language the kind that we use to
communicate information is one-dimensional. It is directed at only part of the listener, the
understanding. Its one dimension is intellectual. Poetry, which is language used to communicate
experience, has at least four dimensions. If it is to communicate experience, it must be directed at the
whole person, not just at your understanding. It must involve not only your intelligence but also your
senses, emotions, and imagination. To the intellectual dimension, poetry adds a sensuous dimension, an
emotional dimension, and an imaginative dimension.
Poetry achieves its extra dimensions its greater pressure per word and its greater tension per poem
by drawing more fully and more consistently than does ordinary language on a number of language
resources, none of which is peculiar to poetry. These various resources form the subjects of a number
of the following chapters. Among them are connotation, imagery, metaphor, symbol, paradox, irony,
allusion, sound repetition, rhythm, and pattern. Using these resources and the materials of life, the poet
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shapes and makes a poem. Successful poetry is never effusive language. If it is to come alive it must be
an organism whose every part serves a useful purpose and cooperates with every other part to preserve
and express the life that is within it.

ARS POETICA
by Archibald MacLeish
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as he sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown-
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind-
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea-
A poem should not mean
But be.

ARISTOTLE (from The Poetics):
"Imitation comes naturally to human beings from childhood; so does the universal pleasure in
imitation. We take delight in viewing the most accurate possible images of objects which in
themselves even cause distress when we see them (e.g. the shapes of the lowest species of animal, and
corpses). The reason for this is that understanding is extremely pleasant, not just for philosophers but
for others too in the same way, despite their limited capacity for it. This is the reason why people take
delight in seeing images; what happens is that as they view them they come to understand and work out
what each thing is (e.g., 'This is so-and-so.')"

SAMUEL JOHNSON (from Preface to Shakespeare):
"The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing."

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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (from Biographia Literaria):
"A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its
immediate object pleasure, not truth; and . . . discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the
whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part."
"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the
subordination of faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone
and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical
power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination."

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (from Preface to Lyrical Ballads):
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually
disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually
produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."
"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science. Emphatically it may be said of the poet, as Shakespeare has said of man,
"that he looks before and after." He is the rock of defense for human nature; an upholder and preserver,
carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things
violently destroyed; the poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."

DOUGLAS McGILL
"A piece of writing is poetic when it:"
Sings
2. Moves
3. Shimmers
4. Cracks the whip
5. Has an indefinable "woo woo" quality
6. Recreates the early childhood pleasures of moon, Mom, and mud
7. Forces an epiphany
8. Imitates nature
9. Contains the music of plain speech
10. Marries sound and meaning
11. Just sounds good
12. Shatters self-important, secluded views of the world
13. Snaps you into a different state of mind
14. Sets off your indicator lights
15. Is the exact opposite of a gazebungle
16. Connects the reader with an interior "otherness," sort of like music
17. Brings the whole soul of man into activity
18. Offers the most accurate possible symbolic image of objects which when they are actually seen
cause distress (corpses, worms, etc.)
19. Instructs by pleasing
20. Proposes pleasure, not truth, as the immediate object of attention
21. Creates a sort of religious feeling
22. Is nothing else, so is poetic by default
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23. Remembers things silently gone out of mind
24. Induces movement by precise expression
25. Transforms contemplated emotion into actual, felt emotion
26. Breathes the finer spirit of all knowledge
27. Looks before and after
28. Sees relationships and love everywhere
29. Binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society
30. Feels as if it was always intended to be written as a poem and does not feel like prose in drag
31. Achieves a certain level of song that exceeds the limits of human language
32. Causes a crackling blue spark to arc from the page to the reader's mind
33. Purges pity and terror
34. Ritualistically recalls horrible memories in loving detail
35. Is news that stays news
36. Hits you with a brick
37. Lives beautifully for a moment and then dies
38. Burns for the joy of it
39. Rings your bell
40. Lifts you off.

BILLY COLLINS
"Introduction To Poetry"
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

ROBERT FROST
"A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out
toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found
its thought and the thought has found the words."
First published in Robert Frost: The Man and His Work. New York: Henry Holt, 1923.

ROBERT PINSKY
"Poetry...is an ancient art or technology: older than the computer, older than print, older than writing
and indeed, though some may find this surprising, much older than prose. I presume that the
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technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses; to hold things in
memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to
express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions,
and also with the dead and with those to come after us."
The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998: 8-9.
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Sir Thomas Wyatt (15031542) was born in Kent and educated at St. Johns College, Cambridge. He
spent most of his life as a courtier and diplomat, serving King Henry VIII as ambassador to Spain and
as a member of several missions to Italy and France. These travels introduced Wyatt to Italian writers
of the High Renaissance, whose work he translated, thus introducing the sonnet form into English. He
was arrested twice and charged with treason, sent to the Tower of London, and acquitted in 1541.
Aristocratic poets at the time rarely published their poems themselves: Works circulated in manuscript
and in published collections (miscellanies) gathered by printers. The most important of these is a
volume published by Richard Tottel in 1557 titled Songs and Sonnets but more commonly known as
Tottels Miscellany, which includes ninety-seven of Wyatts sonnets and delightful lyrics.

THEY flee from me

THEY flee from me, that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking within my chamber :
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember,
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand ; and now they range
Busily seeking in continual change.
Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better ; but once especial,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, ' Dear heart, how like you this ?'
It was no dream ; for I lay broad awaking :
But all is turn'd now through my gentleness,
Into a bitter fashion of forsaking ;
And I have leave to go of her goodness ;
And she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I unkindly so am served :
How like you this, what hath she now deserved ?

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Edmund Spenser (15521599), a contemporary of William Shakespeare, was the greatest nondramatic
poet of his time. Best known for his romantic and national epic The Faerie Queene, Spenser wrote
poems of a number of other types as well and was important as an innovator in metrics and form (as in
his development of the special form of sonnet that bears his nameSpenserian Sonnet). One day I
wrote her name upon the strand is number 75 in Amoretti, a sequence of sonnets about a courtship
addressed to a woman named Elizabeth, probably Elizabeth Boyle, who became his second wife.

Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote her Name

1One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
2But came the waves and washed it away:
3Again I wrote it with a second hand,
4But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
5"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,
6A mortal thing so to immortalize;
7For I myself shall like to this decay,
8And eke my name be wiped out likewise."
9"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise
10To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
11My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
12And in the heavens write your glorious name:
13Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
14Our love shall live, and later life renew."

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Sir Philip Sidney (15541586) was born into an important aristocratic family in Elizabethan England.
He attended Shrewsbury School and Oxford University, although he left without a degree and
completed his education through extended travel on the Continent. He was the epitome of the well-
rounded courtier idealized in his era, excelling as a soldier, writer, literary patron, and diplomat. He
was the author of an important work of prose fiction (Arcadia), a landmark essay in literary criticism
(The Defense of Poesy), and an important sonnet cycle (Astrophil and Stella, which includes Loving
in truth, and fain in verse my love to show). His poetry has been labeled news from the heart.

Sonnet XXXIX

Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof, shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;
O make in me those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,
A rosy garland and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born at Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564. His father became an
important public figure, rising to the position of high bailiff (equivalent to mayor) of Stratford.
Although we know practically nothing of his personal life, we may assume that Shakespeare received a
decent grammar school education in literature, logic, and Latin (though not in mathematics or natural
science). When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior; six months later
their son was born. Two years later, Anne bore twins.
We do not know how the young Shakespeare supported his family, and we do not hear of him again
until 1592, when a rival London playwright sarcastically refers to him as an "upstart crow."
Shakespeare seems to have prospered in the London theater world. He probably began as an actor, and
earned enough as author and part owner of his company's theaters to acquire property.
His sonnets, which were written during the 1590s, reveal rich and varied interests. Some are addressed
to an attractive young man (whom the poet urges to marry); others to the mysterious dark lady; still
others suggest a love triangle of two men and a woman. His dramas include historical plays based on
English dynastic struggles; comedies, both festive and dark; romances such as Pericles (1608) and
Cymbeline (1611) that cover decades in the lives of their characters; and the great tragedies: Hamlet
(1602), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1606).

Sonnet XII

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
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Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet XXIX

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,-- and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate,;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
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Sonnet XXX

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
Sonnet XCIV

They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself, it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
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Sonnet CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved

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John Donne (1572-1631). Born in London into a prosperous Roman Catholic family of tradespeople at
a time when England was staunchly anti-Catholic, Donne was forced to leave Oxford without a degree
because of his religion. He studied law and, at the same time, read widely in theology in an attempt to
decide whether the Roman or the Anglican Church was the true Catholic Church, a decision he was not
able to make for many years.
In the meantime, he became known as a witty man of the world and the author of original, often dense,
erotic poems. Donne left his law studies, participated in two naval expeditions, and then became
secretary to a powerful noble, a job he lost when he was briefly sent to prison for secretly marrying his
patron's niece.
In 1615, at the age of forty-two, Donne accepted ordination in the Anglican Church. He quickly earned
a reputation as one of the greatest preachers of his time. He was Dean of St. Paul's from 1621 until his
death. In his later years, Donne repudiated the poetry of his youth.

Death Be Not Proud

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die

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Ben Jonson (1572-1637) Known primarily as a writer of comedies such as Every Man in His Humor
(1598) and Every Man out of His Humor (1599) in the reign of Elizabeth, Ben Jonson's (1572-1637)
most interesting plays were performed during the reign (called the Jacobean period) of her successor,
King James I. Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610) stand today as Jonson's most often produced
plays. Both are broad comedies: Volpone plays on the foxiness of a dying man who is anxious to see
which of his heirs is worthy, and The Alchemist is a satire on the wiliness of con men who pretend to
know how to transmute base metal into gold. All of these plays were highly regarded in Jacobean
times. In addition to his comedies, Jonson's tragedies Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611) earned him
the description of "best in tragedy" from a contemporary who maintained a diary devoted to his
experiences in the theater.

On My First Daughter
Here lies, to each her parents' ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth;
Yet all heaven's gifts being heaven's due,
It makes the father less to rue.
At six months' end, she parted hence
With safety of her innocence;
Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,
In comfort of her mother's tears,
Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:
Where, while that severed doth remain,
This grave partakes the fleshly birth;
Which cover lightly, gentle earth!

On My First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age !
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

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TO CELIA
DRINK to me, only, with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine ;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask a drink divine :
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not wither'd be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me :
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.

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John Milton (1608-1674), an English Puritan and a courageous defender of political liberty, defied
both pope and king and was therefore in many respects a prophetic voice of the European opposition to
established authority in the late Renaissance. His service to the Puritan cause during the English Civil
War, including the writing of pamphlets containing strongly held views on public matters, made him a
compelling figure in English society.
His great poetry, most of it written in his later years while he was totally blind, left the world its
ineradicable Renaissance version of tragedy, defined as the freedom to seek our own destiny coupled
with the prospect of failure should we overreach ourselves in defiance of God.

Sonnet I.

O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray
Warbl'st at eeve, when all the Woods are still,
Thou with fresh hope the Lovers heart dost fill,
While the jolly hours lead on propitious May,
Thy liquid notes that close the eye of Day,
First heard before the shallow Cuccoo's bill
Portend success in love; O if Jove's will
Have linkt that amorous power to thy soft lay,
Now timely sing, ere the rude Bird of Hate
Foretell my hopeles doom in som Grove ny:
As thou from yeer to yeer hast sung too late
For my relief; yet hadst no reason why,
Whether the Muse, or Love call thee his mate,
Both them I serve, and of their train am I.

Sonnet XVI.
When I consider how my light is spent,
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
18
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.
Sonnet XIX.
Methought I saw my late espoused Saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Joves great Son to her glad Husband gave,
Rescu'd from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint,
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was vail'd, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

19
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) was born in England, the daughter of a "well borne woman" of
modest wealth and a father who was the steward of the country estate of the Earl of Lincoln. Both the
earl and Bradstreet's parents were Puritans, and she was given a much better education than most young
women of her time. At sixteen she married Simon Bradstreet, also a Puritan, and two years later, in
1630, she, her husband, and her parents sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They lived first in
Boston and in 1664 moved to North Andover, where Bradstreet lived for the rest of her life.
In 1650, without her knowledge, her brother-in-law took a gathering of her poems to London. The
collection was the first to be published by anyone living in the North American colonies, and the book
attracted considerable attention. Because of the constraints placed on women's lives, her brother-in-law
felt obliged to assure suspicious readers, in the introduction, that Bradstreet was respectable according
to the standards of the time. The poems, he wrote, were "the work of a woman, honored and esteemed
where she lives, for her gracious demeanor, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous
disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions."

To my Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye woman, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the east doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so perservere
That when we live no more, we may live ever
20
The Author to her Book

Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad expos'd to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun Cloth, i' th' house I find.
In this array, 'mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.
In Critics' hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door.

21
William Blake (1757-1827). Born in London to an obscure family, Blake was educated at home until
he was ten, then enrolled in a drawing school, advancing ultimately to a formal apprenticeship as an
engraver. At an early age, Blake exhibited talent as both an artist and a poet, and throughout his life
read widely among modern philosophers and poets.
Throughout his life, he experienced mystical visions that provided him with the inspiration for many of
his poems. Blake devised a process he called illuminated printing, which involved the preparation of
drawings and decorative frames to complement his poems. He published Songs of Innocence (1789)
and Songs of Experience (1794) in this fashion. These books, as well as the many subsequent works he
wrote and illustrated, earned him a reputation as one of the most important artists of his day.
Many of Blake's works assert his conviction that the established church and state hinder rather than
nurture human freedom and the sense of divine love.

A Little Boy Lost

"Nought loves another as itself
Nor venerates another so
Nor is it possible to though
A greater than itself to know

"And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more
I love you like the little bir
That picks up crumbs around the door.

The Priest sat by and heard the child
In trembling zeal he seized his hair
He led him by his little coat
And all admired the priestly care.

And standing on the altar high
"Lo, what a fiend is here! said he
"One who sets reason up for judg
Of our most holy mystery.

The weeping child could not be heard
The weeping parents wept in vain
They stripped him to his little shirt
And bound him in an iron chain

And burned him in a holy plac
Where many had been burned before
The weeping parents wept in vain
Are such thing done on Albion's shore
22
A Little Girl Lost

Children of the future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former tim
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime

In the age of gold
Free from winter's cold
Youth and maiden bright
To the holy light
Naked in the sunny beams delight

Once a youthful pair
Filled with softest care
Met in garden brigh
Where the holy ligh
Had just removed the curtains of the night

Then, in rising day
On the grass they play
Parents were afar
Strangers came not near
And the maiden soon forgot her fear

Tired with kisses sweet
They agree to mee
When the silent slee
Waves o'er heaven's deep
And the weary tired wanderers weep

To her father whit
Came the maiden bright
But his loving look
Like the holy boo
All her tender limbs with terror shook

"Ona, pale and weak
To thy father speak
Oh the trembling fear
Oh the dismal car
That shakes the blossoms of my hoary hair!
23
The Little Black Boy

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And, pointed to the east, began to say:

"Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away,
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

"And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

"For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,
Saying, 'Come out from the grove, my love and care
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice',"

Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
24
The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And What shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
25
The Lamb

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed,
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee.
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

26
Robert Burns (1759-1796). Born in Scotland to a family of poor tenant farmers, Burns was working in
the fields with his father by age twelve. During these early years, the family moved often in fruitless
attempts to improve its lot. Although Burns received formal education only intermittently, he read
widely on his own.
After the death of his father, Burns and his brother worked vainly to make their farm pay, an effort
Burns was able to abandon when his first volume of poetry, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
(1786) brought him overnight fame. One result of this fame was his appointment as an excise officer, a
position that gave him some financial security while he continued to write poetry. Burns's humble
origins instilled in him a lifelong sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, the rebels and iconoclasts, as
well as a disdain for religion, particularly Calvinism and what he considered the hypocrisy of its
"devout" ministers.

A Red, Red Rose

O, my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my Luve's like a melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair as thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
I will love thess till, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run:

And fare thee well, my only luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it ware ten thousand mile

27
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in Cockermouth in the Lake District of northern England.
Wordsworth's mother died when he was eight, and his father died five years later, causing Wordsworth
to be separated from his sister, to whom he was very close. In 1787, he entered St. John's College,
Cambridge, the same year he published his first sonnet. Along with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834), Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a work which marks the beginning of the
English Romantic movement. While traveling in France in 1790, Wordsworth had an affair with
Annette Vallon that resulted in the birth of a daughter. His tour of France made him an ardent defender
of the French Revolution and kindled his sympathies for the plight of the common person.
Wordsworth produced his most important works during the years 1797-1808, a period during which he
was mainly settled in England, reunited with his sister, and inspired by a feeling of close contact with
nature. His second volume of poetry, Poems, in Two Volumes, appeared in 1807, and though he
completed the autobiographical poem "The Prelude" in 1805, it was not published until 1850, after
Wordsworth's death. As he grew older, Wordsworth grew increasingly conservative. While he
continued to write prolifically, little of his of his later work attained the heights of the earlier work.

The Rainbow

My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the man;
And I wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety

"The World Is To Much With Us; Late and Soon"

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
28
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn
29
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils
30
To a Skylark

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!
Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

31
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was born in a small village in southern England, but after the
death of his father he was sent to school in London. Despite his indolence, he could also be
sporadically brilliant, and at nineteen he entered Cambridge University, where his lack of discipline
overwhelmed him, and he was unable to complete his degree.
In 1794 Coleridge met the young poet Robert Southey and, filled with the fervor of the French
Revolution, they decided to establish a utopian colony in Pennsylvania. Their plans fell apart, but
Coleridge, as part of the plan, had married the sister of Southey's fiance. The marriage was as unhappy
as everything else Coleridge had attempted. The next year he met William Wordsworth and soon
moved close to where the older poet and his sister Dorothy were living in England. Writing together, in
a fever of excitement, he and Wordsworth completed the small collection titled Lyrical Ballads, which
was published in 1798. With their book they attempted to write a new kind of poetry, closer to ordinary
speech and drawing from everyday emotions. Coleridge's contribution was the long supernatural
narrative "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and several shorter poems.
Coleridge by this time was addicted to opium, and his writing became chaotically uneven. "Kubla
Khan" is the best known of his drug-influenced poems. When he later overcame his addiction he
became one of the most important literary theorists and critics of the early nineteenth century. His
lifelong friend, the writer Charles Lamb, described Coleridge as "an archangel, slightly damaged."

Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
32
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
33
To the Nightingale

Sister of love-lorn Poets, Philomel!
How many Bards in city garret pent,
While at their window they with downward eye
Mark the faint lamp-beam on the kennell'd mud,
And listen to the drowsy cry of Watchmen
(Those hoarse unfeather'd Nightingales of Time!),
How many wretched Bards address thy name,
And hers, the full-orb'd Queen that shines above.
But I do hear thee, and the high bough mark,
Within whose mild moon-mellow'd foliage hid
Thou warblest sad thy pity-pleading strains.
O! I have listen'd, till my working soul,
Waked by those strains to thousand phantasies,
Absorb'd hath ceas'd to listen! Therefore oft,
I hymn thy name: and with a proud delight
Oft will I tell thee, Minstrel of the Moon!
'Most musical, most melancholy' Bird!
That all thy soft diversities of tone,
Tho' sweeter far than the delicious airs
That vibrate from a white-arm'd Lady's harp,
What time the languishment of lonely love
Melts in her eye, and heaves her breast of snow,
Are not so sweet as is the voice of her,
My Sara - best beloved of human kind!
When breathing the pure soul of tenderness,
She thrills me with the Husband's promis'd name

34
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Born near Horsham, England, Shelley was the son of a wealthy
landowner who sat in Parliament. At University College, Oxford, he befriended Thomas Jefferson
Hogg. Both became interested in radical philosophy and quickly became inseparable. After one year at
Oxford they were expelled together for writing and circulating a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of
Atheism." Shelley married Harriet Westbrook soon after leaving Oxford. Though they had two
children, the marriage was unsuccessful, and in 1814, Shelley left Harriet for Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin (author of Frankenstein [1818]). After Harriet's death (an apparent suicide), Shelley and
Godwin were married.
Escaping legal problems in England, he settled in Pisa, Italy, in 1820, and died in a sailing accident
before his thirtieth birthday. A playwright and essayist as well as a romantic poet, Shelley is admired
for his dramatic poem "Prometheus Unbound" (1820).

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

35
The Cloud

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning, my pilot, sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardors of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
36
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,--
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-colored bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
37
Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
38
To A Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight:

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see--we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud.
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
39
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves.

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine, would be all
But an empty vaunt--
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
40
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now!
41
Mutability

We are the clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

42
John Keats (1795-1821) was born in London, the eldest son of a stablekeeper who died in an accident
in 1804. His mother died of tuberculosis shortly after remarrying, and the grandmother who raised
Keats and his siblings died in 1814.
At eighteen, Keats wrote his first poem, "Imitation of Spenser," inspired by Edmund Spenser's long
narrative poem The Faerie Queene. The thirty-three poems he wrote while training to be a surgeon
were published in 1817, and Keats then gave up medicine for writing.
After more traumatic losses in 1818, including the departure of one brother for America and the death
of his other brother of tuberculosis, Keats wrote his second collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.
Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). Ill with tuberculosis himself, Keats was sent to Rome to recover. He
died at twenty-six, but despite his short career, he is a major figure of the romantic period.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
So haggard and so woe-begone
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a faery's child:
Her hair was long, her foot was ligh,
And her eyes were wild.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said,
"I love thee true!"
43
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild, sad eyes---
So kissed to sleep.

And there we slumbered on the moss,
And there I dreamed, ah! woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried---"La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill side.

And that is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
44
Ode On A Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
Sylvan historian, who canst thus expres
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shap
Of deities or mortals, or of both
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unhear
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leav
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot she
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu
And, happy melodist, unwearied
For ever piping songs for ever new
More happy love! more happy, happy love
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd
For ever panting, and for ever young
All breathing human passion far above
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue

Who are these coming to the sacrifice
To what green altar, O mysterious priest
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest
What little town by river or sea shore
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn
And, little town, thy streets for evermor
Will silent be; and not a soul to tel
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with bred
Of marble men and maidens overwrought
45
With forest branches and the trodden weed
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of though
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral
When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other wo
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is al
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
46
Ode To A Nightingale

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,---
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

47
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain---
To thy high requiem become a sod

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:---do I wake or sleep?

48
Ode To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,---
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
49
When I Have Fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain
Before high-piled books, in charactery
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trac
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour
That I shall never look upon thee more
Never have relish in the faery powe
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shor
Of the wide world I stand alone, and thin
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink

50
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the son of traveling actors, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Within
a year, his alcoholic father deserted his mother and three infant children. When his mother died of
tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, three-year-old Edgar was adopted by John Allan and his wife.
Allan, a prosperous businessperson, spent time in England, where Poe began his education at private
schools.
Back in the United States, Allan forced Poe to leave the University of Virginia in 1826, when Poe
incurred gambling debts he could not pay. He served in the U.S. Army from 1827 to 1829, eventually
attaining the rank of sergeant-major. Poe next attended West Point, hoping for further military
advancement.
Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Allan died of tuberculosis. Poe angrily confronted his foster father about his
extramarital affairs; for this candor he was disowned. Believing that Allan would never reinstate him as
heir, Poe deliberately violated rules to provoke his dismissal from the Academy. In 1835, Poe began his
career as editor, columnist, and reviewer, earning a living he could not make as a writer of stories and
poems. He married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836, and lived with her and her
mother during a period marked by illness and poverty. Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847. Poe died,
delirious, under mysterious circumstances, in 1849.

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-
Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow- sorrow for the lost Lenore-
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door-
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;-
This it is, and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"- here I opened wide the door;-
Darkness there, and nothing more.

51
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering,
fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"-
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore-
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;-
'Tis the wind and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and
flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed
he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door-
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no
craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore-
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door-
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he fluttered-
Till I scarcely more than muttered, "other friends have flown
before-
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
52
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore-
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never- nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and
door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore-
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee- by these angels he
hath sent thee
Respite- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!- prophet still, if bird or
devil!-
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted-
On this home by horror haunted- tell me truly, I implore-
Is there- is there balm in Gilead?- tell me- tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil- prophet still, if bird or
devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adore-
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend," I shrieked,
upstarting-
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
53
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my
door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the
floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore!
54
Lenore

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!- a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?- weep now or nevermore!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read- the funeral song be sung!-
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young-
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her- that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read?- the requiem how be sung
By you- by yours, the evil eye,- by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"

Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong.
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy
bride.
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes
The life still there, upon her hair- the death upon her eyes.

"Avaunt! avaunt! from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven-
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven-
From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of
Heaven!
Let no bell toll, then,- lest her soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damned Earth!
And I!- to-night my heart is light!- no dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days!"

55
Robert Browning (1812-1889). Born in London, Browning attended a private school and was later
tutored at home. After one year as a student of Greek at the University of London, he moved with his
family to Hatcham, where he studied, wrote poetry, and practiced writing for the theater. In 1845, he
began exchanging poems and letters with the already famous poet Elizabeth Barrett; they eloped in
1846. They moved to Italy, where Browning completed most of his work. When Elizabeth died in
1861, he returned to England and began to establish his own reputation.
He is noted especially for his fine dramatic monologues in which a wide range of characters reveals the
complexity of human belief and passion. His many volumes of poetry include Dramatis Personae
(1864) and The Ring and the Book (1868-1869).

My Last Duchess

FERRARA.

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fr Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
``Fr Pandolf'' by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fr Pandolf chanced to say ``Her mantle laps
``Over my lady's wrist too much,'' or ``Paint
``Must never hope to reproduce the faint
``Half-flush that dies along her throat:'' such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart---how shall I say?---too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace---all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,---good! but thanked
Somehow---I know not how---as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
56
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech---(which I have not)---to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, ``Just this
``Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
``Or there exceed the mark''---and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
---E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
57
Through The Metidja To Abd-El-Kadr
[Abd-el-Kadr was an Arab Chief of Algiers who resisted the French in 1833.]
I.
As I ride, as I ride,
With a full heart for my guide,
So its tide rocks my side,
As I ride, as I ride,
That, as I were double-eyed,
He, in whom our Tribes confide,
Is descried, ways untried
As I ride, as I ride.
II.
As I ride, as I ride
To our Chief and his Allied,
Who dares chide my heart's pride
As I ride, as I ride?
Or are witnesses denied---
Through the desert waste and wide
Do I glide unespied
As I ride, as I ride?
III.
As I ride, as I ride,
When an inner voice has cried,
The sands slide, nor abide
(As I ride, as I ride)
O'er each visioned homicide
That came vaunting (has he lied?)
To reside---where he died,
As I ride, as I ride.
IV.
As I ride, as I ride,
Ne'er has spur my swift horse plied,
Yet his hide, streaked and pied,
As I ride, as I ride,
Shows where sweat has sprung and dried,
---Zebra-footed, ostrich-thighed---
How has vied stride with stride
As I ride, as I ride!
V.
As I ride, as I ride,
Could I loose what Fate has tied,
Ere I pried, she should hide
(As I ride, as I ride)
All that's meant me---satisfied
When the Prophet and the Bride
58
Stop veins I'd have subside
As I ride, as I ride!

59
Walt Whitman (1819-1892). One of nine children, Whitman was born in Huntington, Long Island,
and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father worked as a carpenter. At age eleven, after five years of
public school, Whitman took a job as a printer's assistant. He learned the printing trade and, before his
twentieth birthday, became editor of the Long Islander, a Huntington newspaper. He edited several
newspapers in the New York area and one in New Orleans before leaving the newspaper business in
1848. He then lived with his parents, worked as a part-time carpenter, and began writing Leaves of
Grass, which he first published at his own expense in 1855.
After the Civil War (during which he was a devoted volunteer, ministering to the wounded), Whitman
was fired from his job in the Department of the Interior by Secretary James Harlan, who considered
Leaves of Grass obscene. Soon, however, he was rehired in the attorney general's office, where he
remained until 1874.
In 1881, after many editions, Leaves of Grass finally found a publisher willing to print it uncensored.
Translations were enthusiastically received in Europe, but Whitman remained relatively unappreciated
in America, where it was only after his death that a large audience would come to admire his original
and innovative expression of American individualism.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

60
O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up -- for you the flag is flung -- for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths -- for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

61
From Song of Myself
1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
62
7
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat
and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away

63
16
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest
joints on earth,
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;
At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,
At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,
At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,
Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)
Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,
A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)
64
21
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
I show that size is only development.

Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

Press close bare-bosom'd night -- press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds -- night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night -- mad naked summer night.

Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset -- earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow'd earth -- rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.

Prodigal, you have given me love -- therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love.

65
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of three children, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father
was a prominent lawyer. Except for one year away at a nearby college and a trip with her sister to
Washington, D.C., to visit her father when he was serving in Congress, she lived out her life,
unmarried, in her parents' home.
During her trip to Washington, she met the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a married man, whom she
came to characterize as her "dearest earthly friend." Little is known of this relationship except that
Dickinson's feelings for Wadsworth were strong. In 1862 Wadsworth moved to San Francisco, an event
that coincided with a period of Dickinson's intense poetic creativity. Also in that year, she initiated a
literary correspondence with the critic T. W. Higginson, to whom she sent some of her poems for his
reactions. Higginson, although he recognized her talent, was puzzled by her startling originality and
urged her to write more conventionally.
Unable to do so, she concluded, we may surmise, that she would never see her poems through the
press. In fact, only seven of her poems were published while she was alive, none of them with her
consent. After her death, the extraordinary richness of her imaginative life came to light with the
discovery of her more than one thousand lyrics.

288

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!
How public -- like a Frog --
To tell one's name -- the livelong June --
To an admiring Bog!
66
712

Because I could not stop for Death --
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality.

We slowly drove -- He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility --

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess -- in the Ring --
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain --
We passed the Setting Sun --

Or rather -- He passed Us --
The Dews drew quivering and chill --
For only Gossamer, my Gown --
My Tippet -- only Tulle --

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground --
The Roof was scarcely visible --
The Cornice -- in the Ground --

Since then -- 'tis Centuries -- and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity --

829

Ample make this Bed --
Make this Bed with Awe --
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

Be its Mattress straight --
Be its Pillow round --
Let no Sunrise' yellow noise
67
Interrupt this Ground --
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 --

68
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Ireland and educated in both Ireland and London.
Much of his poetry and many of his plays reflect his fascination with the history of Ireland, particularly
the myths and legends of its ancient, pagan past, as well as his interest in the occult.
As Yeats matured, he turned increasingly to contemporary subjects, expressing his nationalism in
poems about the Irish struggle for independence from England. In 1891, he became one of the founders
of an Irish literary society in London (the Rhymers' Club) and of another in Dublin the following year.
Already a recognized poet, Yeats helped to establish the Irish National Theater in 1899; its first
production was his play The Countess Cathleen (written in 1892). His contribution to Irish cultural and
political nationalism led to his appointment as a senator when the Irish Free State was formed in 1922.
Yeats's preeminence as a poet was recognized in 1923, when he received the Nobel Prize for literature.
Among his works are The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), The Wind among the Reeds
(1899), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914), The
Tower (1928), and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939).

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 mackerel-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.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
69
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Symbols
A STORM BEATEN old watch-tower,
A blind hermit rings the hour.

All-destroying sword-blade still
Carried by the wandering fool.

Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid

70
Leda And The Swan
A SUDDEN blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

The Scholars
BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
71
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

72
Robert Frost (18741963) was born in San Francisco and lived there until he was eleven. When his
father died, the family moved to Massachusetts, where Robert did well in school, especially in the
classics, but dropped out of both Dartmouth College and Harvard University. He went unrecognized as
a poet until 1913, when he was first published in England, where he had moved with his wife and four
children. On returning to the United States, he quickly achieved success with more publications and
became the most celebrated poet in mid-twentieth-century America. He held a teaching position at
Amherst College and received many honorary degrees as well as an invitation to recite a poem at John
F. Kennedys inauguration. Although his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of
New England, and although he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics, he is also a
quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological
complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and
irony.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

73
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

74
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was born in St. Louis, but her father chose not to remain with his
family, and eventually Moore and her mother moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She graduated from
Bryn Mawr College in 1909. She had already begun writing poetry in college, and she began
submitting her work to several small experimental magazines. Her poetry immediately attracted the
attention of other writers, including William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Williams included
her work in a small mimeographed magazine he published in the early 1920s. From 1925 to 1929 she
was editor of The Dial, a New York literary journal
In 1951 Moore's Collected Poems won almost every major American literary award, and her work
found new audiences who were charmed by her enthusiasm for oddly named animals, racehorses, and
the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Silence

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "`Make my house your inn'."
Inns are not residences.

75
Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base
ball fan, the statistician --
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books": all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination" -- above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

76
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His father was president of the
Hydraulic Press Brick Company, his mother a teacher, social worker, and writer. Educated in private
academies, Eliot earned two philosophy degrees at Harvard (B.A., 1909; M.A., 1910). After graduate
study in Paris and England, he worked for eight years as a clerk in Lloyd's Bank in London, and
became a naturalized British citizen in 1927. He was editor, then director of Faber & Gwyer Publishers
(later Faber & Faber) from 1925 to 1965, and spent time in the United States as a visiting lecturer and
scholar.
Admirers and detractors agree that Eliot was the most imposing and influential poet writing between
the world wars. His poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) and his collection, The Waste
Land (1922) are among his earliest and most famous. Acknowledging his dependence on a preexisting
cultural tradition, Eliot explained: "The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for
order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be altered."
Eliot also wrote plays, including Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1950). The
long-running Broadway musical Cats is based on his 1939 verse collection, Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
77
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair --
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin --
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
78
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

* * * *
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet -- and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor --
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
79
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

80
The hollow men

Mistah Kurtz - he dead
penny for the Old Guy
I.
We arc the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom.
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

I I.
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

81
I I I.
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we arc
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

I V.
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V.
Here we go round the prickly fear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
82
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is the
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

83
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962). Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Edward Estlin Cummings attended
Harvard (B.A., 1915; M.A., 1916), served as a volunteer ambulance driver in France during World War
I, was imprisoned for three months in a French detention camp, served in the United States Army
(1918-1919), then studied art and painting in Paris (1920-1924).
His prose narrative The Enormous Room (1922), a recollection of his imprisonment, brought instant
acclaim. Several volumes of poetry followed. His experiments with punctuation, line division, and
capitalization make his work immediately recognizable. In a letter to young poets published in a high
school newspaper, Cummings said, "[N]othing is quite so easy as using words like somebody else. We
all of us do exactly this nearly all the time, and whenever we do it, we're not poets."

who knows if the moon's

who knows if the moon's
a baloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their baloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves

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Humanity i love you

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

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in Just-

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and

the

goat-footed

baloonMan whistles
far

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Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri. His father was a businessperson and
lawyer, his mother a teacher. Hughes attended Columbia, graduated from Lincoln University in 1929,
traveled throughout the world, and held many odd jobs as a young man.
While Hughes had a long and prolific career as a writer in all genres, he is still remembered as the
central figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a movement which committed itself to the
examination and celebration of black life in America and its African heritage. He was the Madrid
correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American (1937) and a columnist for the Chicago Defender
(1943-1967) and the New York Post (1962-1967).
His poems of racial affirmation and protest are often infused with the rhythms of blues and jazz music.
He wrote over two dozen plays (many musicalized) and founded the Suitcase Theater (Harlem, 1938),
the New Negro Theater (Los Angeles, 1939), and the Skyloft Players (Chicago, 1941). His works
include The Weary Blues (1926), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), and The Panther and the Lash:
Poems of Our Times (1969).

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its
muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers

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Question [1]

When the old junk man Death
Comes to gather up our bodies
And toss them into the sack of oblivion,
I wonder if he will find
The corpse of a white multi-millionaire
Worth more pennies of eternity,
Than the black torso of
A Negro cotton-picker?

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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where her parents taught at Boston
University. She graduated summa cum laude in English from Smith College (1955), earned an M.A. as
a Fullbright scholar at Newnham College, Cambridge (1955-1957), and married British poet Ted
Hughes (1956).
Plath's poetry reveals the anger and anxiety that would eventually lead to her suicide. Her view that all
relationships were in some way destructive and predatory surely darkened her life. Yet in 1963, during
the month between the publication of her only novel, The Bell Jar (about a suicidal college student),
and her death, Plath was extraordinarily productive; she produced finished poems every day. One critic
suggests that for her, suicide was a positive act, a "refusal to collaborate" in a world she could not
accept. Her Collected Poems was published in 1981.

Cinderella
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

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Candles
They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they'll ignore
A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,
Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows
Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments,
And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna.
As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef.
The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white.
And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,
Imagining himself a headwaiter in America,
Floating in a high-church hush
Among ice buckets, frosty napkins.
These little globes of light are sweet as pears.
Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,
They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.
I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening.
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By Candlelight
This is winter, this is night, small love ---
A sort of black horsehair,
A rough, dumb country stuff
Steeled with the sheen
Of what green stars can make it to our gate.
I hold you in my arm.
It is very late.
The dull bells tongue the hour.
The mirror floats us at one candle power.
This is the fluid in which we meet each other,
This haloey radiance that seems to breathe
And lets our shadows wither
Only to blow
Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.
One match scratch makes you real.
At first the candle will not bloom at all ---
It snuffs its bud to almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.
I hold my breath until you creak to life,
Balled hedgehog,
Small and cross. The yellow knife
Grows tall. You clutch your bars.
My singing makes you roar.
I rock you like a boat
Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor,
While the brass man
Kneels, back bent as best he can
Hefting his white pillar with the light
That keeps the sky at bay,
The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight!
He is all yours, the little brassy Atlas ---
Poor heirloom, all you have
At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs,
No child, no wife.
Five balls! Five bright brass balls!
To juggle with, my love when the sky falls.

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G l o s s a r y o f p o e t i c T e r m s

Accent The emphasis, or stress, given a syllable in pronunciation. We say "syllable" not "syllable,"
"emphasis" not "emphasis." Accents can also be used to emphasize a particular word in a sentence: Is
she content with the contents of the yellow package? See also meter.
Alliteration The repetition of the same consonant sounds in a sequence of words, usually at the
beginning of a word or stressed syllable: "descending dew drops"; "luscious lemons." Alliteration is
based on the sounds of letters, rather than the spelling of words; for example, "keen" and "car"
alliterate, but "car" and "cite" do not. Used sparingly, alliteration can intensify ideas by emphasizing
key words, but when used too self-consciously, it can be distracting, even ridiculous, rather than
effective. See also assonance, consonance.
Allusion A brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature. Allusions
conjure up biblical authority, scenes from Shakespeares plays, historic figures, wars, great love stories,
and anything else that might enrich an authors work. Allusions imply reading and cultural experiences
shared by the writer and reader, functioning as a kind of shorthand whereby the recalling of something
outside the work supplies an emotional or intellectual context, such as a poem about current racial
struggles calling up the memory of Abraham Lincoln.
Ambiguity Allows for two or more simultaneous interpretations of a word, phrase, action, or situation,
all of which can be supported by the context of a work. Deliberate ambiguity can contribute to the
effectiveness and richness of a work, for example, in the open-ended conclusion to Hawthornes
"Young Goodman Brown." However, unintentional ambiguity obscures meaning and can confuse
readers.
Anagram A word or phrase made from the letters of another word or phrase, as "heart" is an anagram
of "earth." Anagrams have often been considered merely an exercise of ones ingenuity, but sometimes
writers use anagrams to conceal proper names or veiled messages, or to suggest important connections
between words, as in "hated" and "death."
Anapestic meter See foot.
Apostrophe An address, either to someone who is absent and therefore cannot hear the speaker or to
something nonhuman that cannot comprehend. Apostrophe often provides a speaker the opportunity to
think aloud.
Approximate rhyme See rhyme.
Assonance The repetition of internal vowel sounds in nearby words that do not end the same, for
example, "asleep under a tree," or "each evening." Similar endings result in rhyme, as in "asleep in the
deep." Assonance is a strong means of emphasizing important words in a line. See also alliteration,
consonance.
Ballad Traditionally, a ballad is a song, transmitted orally from generation to generation, that tells a
story and that eventually is written down. As such, ballads usually cannot be traced to a particular
author or group of authors. Typically, ballads are dramatic, condensed, and impersonal narratives, such
as "Bonny Barbara Allan." A literary ballad is a narrative poem that is written in deliberate imitation of
the language, form, and spirit of the traditional ballad, such as Keatss "La Belle Dame sans Merci."
See also ballad stanza, quatrain.
Ballad stanza A four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, consisting of alternating eight- and six-syllable
lines. Usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme (an abcb pattern). Coleridge adopted the ballad
stanza in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
All in a hot and copper sky
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
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No bigger than the Moon.
See also ballad, quatrain.
Blank verse Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is the English verse form closest to the natural
rhythms of English speech and therefore is the most common pattern found in traditional English
narrative and dramatic poetry from Shakespeare to the early twentieth century. Shakespeares plays use
blank verse extensively. See also iambic pentameter.
Caesura A pause within a line of poetry that contributes to the rhythm of the line. A caesura can occur
anywhere within a line and need not be indicated by punctuation. In scanning a line, caesuras are
indicated by a double vertical line (||). See also meter, rhythm, scansion.
Clich An idea or expression that has become tired and trite from overuse, its freshness and clarity
having worn off. Clichs often anesthetize readers, and are usually a sign of weak writing. See also
sentimentality, stock responses.
Colloquial Refers to a type of informal diction that reflects casual, conversational language and often
includes slang expressions. See also diction.
Connotation Associations and implications that go beyond the literal meaning of a word, which derive
from how the word has been commonly used and the associations people make with it. For example,
the word eagle connotes ideas of liberty and freedom that have little to do with the words literal
meaning. See also denotation.
Consonance A common type of near rhyme that consists of identical consonant sounds preceded by
different vowel sounds: home, same; worth, breath. See also rhyme.
Contextual symbol See symbol.
Controlling metaphor See metaphor.
Convention A characteristic of a literary genre (often unrealistic) that is understood and accepted by
audiences because it has come, through usage and time, to be recognized as a familiar technique. For
example, the division of a play into acts and scenes is a dramatic convention, as are soliloquies and
asides. flashbacks and foreshadowing are examples of literary conventions.
Conventional symbol See symbol.
Cosmic irony See irony.
Couplet Two consecutive lines of poetry that usually rhyme and have the same meter. A heroic couplet
is a couplet written in rhymed iambic pentameter.
Dactylic meter See foot.
Denotation The dictionary meaning of a word. See also connotation.
Dialect A type of informational diction. Dialects are spoken by definable groups of people from a
particular geographic region, economic group, or social class. Writers use dialect to contrast and
express differences in educational, class, social, and regional backgrounds of their characters. See also
diction.
Diction A writers choice of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language, which
combine to help create meaning. Formal diction consists of a dignified, impersonal, and elevated use of
language; it follows the rules of syntax exactly and is often characterized by complex words and lofty
tone. Middle diction maintains correct language usage, but is less elevated than formal diction; it
reflects the way most educated people speak. Informal diction represents the plain language of
everyday use, and often includes idiomatic expressions, slang, contractions, and many simple, common
words. Poetic diction refers to the way poets sometimes employ an elevated diction that deviates
significantly from the common speech and writing of their time, choosing words for their supposedly
inherent poetic qualities. Since the eighteenth century, however, poets have been incorporating all
kinds of diction in their work and so there is no longer an automatic distinction between the language
of a poet and the language of everyday speech. See also dialect.
Didactic poetry Poetry designed to teach an ethical, moral, or religious lesson. Michael
Wigglesworths Puritan poem Day of Doom is an example of didactic poetry.
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Doggerel A derogatory term used to describe poetry whose subject is trite and whose rhythm and
sounds are monotonously heavy-handed.
Dramatic monologue A type of lyric poem in which a character (the speaker) addresses a distinct but
silent audience imagined to be present in the poem in such a way as to reveal a dramatic situation and,
often unintentionally, some aspect of his or her temperament or personality. See also lyric.
Elegy A mournful, contemplative lyric poem written to commemorate someone who is dead, often
ending in a consolation. Tennysons In Memoriam, written on the death of Arthur Hallam, is an elegy.
Elegy may also refer to a serious meditative poem produced to express the speakers melancholy
thoughts. See also lyric.
End rhyme See rhyme.
End-stopped line A poetic line that has a pause at the end. End-stopped lines reflect normal speech
patterns and are often marked by punctuation. The first line of Keatss "Endymion" is an example of an
end-stopped line; the natural pause coincides with the end of the line, and is marked by a period:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
English sonnet See sonnet.
Enjambment In poetry, when one line ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its
meaning. This is also called a run-on line. The transition between the first two lines of Wordsworths
poem "My Heart Leaps Up" demonstrates enjambment:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
Envoy See sestina.
Epic A long narrative poem, told in a formal, elevated style, that focuses on a serious subject and
chronicles heroic deeds and events important to a culture or nation. Miltons Paradise Lost, which
attempts to "justify the ways of God to man," is an epic. See also narrative poem.
Epigram A brief, pointed, and witty poem that usually makes a satiric or humorous point. Epigrams
are most often written in couplets, but take no prescribed form.
Euphony Euphony ("good sound") refers to language that is smooth and musically pleasant to the ear.
See also cacophony.
Exact rhyme See rhyme.
Extended metaphor See metaphor.
Eye rhyme See rhyme.
Falling meter See meter.
Feminine rhyme See rhyme.
Figures of speech Ways of using language that deviate from the literal, denotative meanings of words
in order to suggest additional meanings or effects. Figures of speech say one thing in terms of
something else, such as when an eager funeral director is described as a vulture. See also metaphor,
simile.
First-person narrator See narrator.
Fixed form A poem that may be categorized by the pattern of its lines, meter, rhythm, or stanzas. A
sonnet is a fixed form of poetry because by definition it must have fourteen lines. Other fixed forms
include limerick, sestina, and villanelle. However, poems written in a fixed form may not always fit
into categories precisely, because writers sometimes vary traditional forms to create innovative effects.
See also open form.
Foot The metrical unit by which a line of poetry is measured. A foot usually consists of one stressed
and one or two unstressed syllables. An iambic foot, which consists of one unstressed syllable followed
by one stressed syllable ("away"), is the most common metrical foot in English poetry. A trochaic foot
consists of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable ("lovely"). An anapestic foot is two
unstressed syllables followed by one stressed one ("understand"). A dactylic foot is one stressed
syllable followed by two unstressed ones ("desperate"). A spondee is a foot consisting of two stressed
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syllables ("dead set"), but is not a sustained metrical foot and is used mainly for variety or emphasis.
See also iambic pentameter, line, meter.
Form The overall structure or shape of a work, which frequently follows an established design. Forms
may refer to a literary type (narrative form, short story form) or to patterns of meter, lines, and rhymes
(stanza form, verse form). See also fixed form, open form.
Formal diction See diction.
Found poem An unintentional poem discovered in a nonpoetic context, such as a conversation, news
story, or advertisement. Found poems serve as reminders that everyday language often contains what
can be considered poetry, or that poetry is definable as any text read as a poem.
Free verse Also called open form poetry, free verse refers to poems characterized by their
nonconformity to established patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza. Free verse uses elements such as
speech patterns, grammar, emphasis, and breath pauses to decide line breaks, and usually does not
rhyme. See open form.
Genre A French word meaning kind or type. The major genres in literature are poetry, fiction, drama,
and essays. Genre can also refer to more specific types of literature such as comedy, tragedy, epic
poetry, or science fiction.
Haiku A style of lyric poetry borrowed from the Japanese that typically presents an intense emotion or
vivid image of nature, which, traditionally, is designed to lead to a spiritual insight. Haiku is a fixed
poetic form, consisting of seventeen syllables organized into three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and
five syllables. Today, however, many poets vary the syllabic count in their haiku. See also fixed form.
Hero, heroine See character.
Heroic couplet See couplet.
Hyperbole A boldly exaggerated statement that adds emphasis without in-tending to be literally true,
as in the statement "He ate everything in the house." Hyperbole (also called overstatement) may be
used for serious, comic, or ironic effect. See also figures of speech.
Iambic meter See foot.
Iambic pentameter A metrical pattern in poetry which consists of five iambic feet per line. (An iamb,
or iambic foot, consists of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.) See also foot, meter.
Image A word, phrase, or figure of speech (especially a simile or a metaphor) that addresses the senses,
suggesting mental pictures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, or actions. Images offer sensory
impressions to the reader and also convey emotions and moods through their verbal pictures. See also
figures of speech.
Implied metaphor See metaphor.
Informal diction See diction.
Internal rhyme See rhyme.
Irony A literary device that uses contradictory statements or situations to reveal a reality different from
what appears to be true. It is ironic for a firehouse to burn down, or for a police station to be
burglarized. Verbal irony is a figure of speech that occurs when a person says one thing but means the
opposite. Sarcasm is a strong form of verbal irony that is calculated to hurt someone through, for
example, false praise. Dramatic irony creates a discrepancy between what a character believes or says
and what the reader or audience member knows to be true. Tragic irony is a form of dramatic irony
found in tragedies such as Oedipus the King, in which Oedipus searches for the person responsible for
the plague that ravishes his city and ironically ends up hunting himself. Situational irony exists when
there is an incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens due to forces
beyond human comprehension or control. The suicide of the seemingly successful main character in
Edwin Arlington Robinsons poem "Richard Cory" is an example of situational irony. Cosmic irony
occurs when a writer uses God, destiny, or fate to dash the hopes and expectations of a character or of
humankind in general. In cosmic irony, a discrepancy exists between what a character aspires to and
what universal forces provide. Stephen Cranes poem "A Man Said to the Universe" is a good example
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of cosmic irony, because the universe acknowledges no obligation to the mans assertion of his own
existence.
Italian sonnet See sonnet.
Limerick A light, humorous style of fixed form poetry. Its usual form consists of five lines with the
rhyme scheme aabba; lines 1, 2, and 5 contain three feet, while lines 3 and 4 usually contain two feet.
Limericks range in subject matter from the silly to the obscene, and since Edward Lear popularized
them in the nineteenth century, children and adults have enjoyed these comic poems. See also fixed
form.
Line A sequence of words printed as a separate entity on the page. In poetry, lines are usually
measured by the number of feet they contain. The names for various line lengths are as follows:
monometer: one foot
dimeter: two feet
trimeter: three feet
tetrameter: four feet
pentameter: five feet
hexameter: six feet
et
octameter: eight feet
The number of feet in a line, coupled with the name of the foot, describes the metrical qualities of that
line. See also end-stopped line, enjambment, foot, meter.
Literary ballad See ballad.
Literary symbol See symbol.
Lyric A type of brief poem that expresses the personal emotions and thoughts of a single speaker. It is
important to realize, however, that although the lyric is uttered in the first person, the speaker is not
necessarily the poet. There are many varieties of lyric poetry, including the dramatic monologue, elegy,
haiku, ode, and sonnet forms.
Metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things,
without using the word like or as. Metaphors assert the identity of dissimilar things, as when Macbeth
asserts that life is a "brief candle." Metaphors can be subtle and powerful, and can transform people,
places, objects, and ideas into whatever the writer imagines them to be. An implied metaphor is a more
subtle comparison; the terms being compared are not so specifically explained. For example, to
describe a stubborn man unwilling to leave, one could say that he was "a mule standing his ground."
This is a fairly explicit metaphor; the man is being compared to a mule. But to say that the man "brayed
his refusal to leave" is to create an implied metaphor, because the subject (the man) is never overtly
identified as a mule. Braying is associated with the mule, a notoriously stubborn creature, and so the
comparison between the stubborn man and the mule is sustained. Implied metaphors can slip by
inattentive readers who are not sensitive to such carefully chosen, highly concentrated language. An
extended metaphor is a sustained comparison in which part or all of a poem consists of a series of
related metaphors. Robert Franciss poem "Catch" relies on an extended metaphor that compares poetry
to playing catch. A controlling metaphor runs through an entire work and determines the form or nature
of that work. The controlling metaphor in Anne Bradstreets poem "The Author to Her Book" likens
her book to a child. Synecdoche is a kind of metaphor in which a part of something is used to signify
the whole, as when a gossip is called a "wagging tongue," or when ten ships are called "ten sails."
Sometimes, synecdoche refers to the whole being used to signify the part, as in the phrase "Boston won
the baseball game." Clearly, the entire city of Boston did not participate in the game; the whole of
Boston is being used to signify the individuals who played and won the game. Metonymy is a type of
metaphor in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it. In this way, we
speak of the "silver screen" to mean motion pictures, "the crown" to stand for the king, "the White
House" to stand for the activities of the president. See also figures of speech, personification, simile.

Meter When a rhythmic pattern of stresses recurs in a poem, it is called meter. Metrical patterns are
determined by the type and number of feet in a line of verse; combining the name of a line length with
the name of a foot concisely describes the meter of the line. Rising meter refers to metrical feet which
96
move from unstressed to stressed sounds, such as the iambic foot and the anapestic foot. Falling meter
refers to metrical feet which move from stressed to unstressed sounds, such as the trochaic foot and the
dactylic foot. See also accent, foot, iambic pentameter, line.
Metonymy See metaphor.
Middle diction See diction.
Narrative poem A poem that tells a story. A narrative poem may be short or long, and the story it
relates may be simple or complex. See also ballad, epic.
Near rhyme See rhyme.
Octave A poetic stanza of eight lines, usually forming one part of a sonnet. See also sonnet, stanza.
Ode A relatively lengthy lyric poem that often expresses lofty emotions in a dignified style. Odes are
characterized by a serious topic, such as truth, art, freedom, justice, or the meaning of life; their tone
tends to be formal. There is no prescribed pattern that defines an ode; some odes repeat the same
pattern in each stanza, while others introduce a new pattern in each stanza. See also lyric.
Off rhyme See rhyme.
Onomatopoeia A term referring to the use of a word that resembles the sound it denotes. Buzz, rattle,
bang, and sizzle all reflect onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia can also consist of more than one word;
writers sometimes create lines or whole passages in which the sound of the words helps to convey their
meanings.
Open form Sometimes called "free verse," open form poetry does not conform to established patterns
of meter, rhyme, and stanza. Such poetry derives its rhythmic qualities from the repetition of words,
phrases, or grammatical structures, the arrangement of words on the printed page, or by some other
means. The poet E. E. Cummings wrote open form poetry; his poems do not have measurable meters,
but they do have rhythm. See also fixed form.
Organic form Refers to works whose formal characteristics are not rigidly predetermined but follow
the movement of thought or emotion being expressed. Such works are said to grow like living
organisms, following their own individual patterns rather than external fixed rules that govern, for
example, the form of a sonnet.
Overstatement See hyperbole.
Oxymoron A condensed form of paradox in which two contradictory words are used together, as in
"sweet sorrow" or "original copy." See also paradox.
Paradox A statement that initially appears to be contradictory but then, on closer inspection, turns out
to make sense. For example, John Donne ends his sonnet "Death, Be Not Proud" with the paradoxical
statement "Death, thou shalt die." To solve the paradox, it is necessary to discover the sense that
underlies the statement. Paradox is useful in poetry because it arrests a readers attention by its
seemingly stubborn refusal to make sense.
Paraphrase A prose restatement of the central ideas of a poem, in your own language.
Parody A humorous imitation of another, usually serious, work. It can take any fixed or open form,
because parodists imitate the tone, language, and shape of the original in order to deflate the subject
matter, making the original work seem absurd. Anthony Hechts poem "Dover Bitch" is a famous
parody of Matthew Arnolds well-known "Dover Beach." Parody may also be used as a form of literary
criticism to expose the defects in a work. But sometimes parody becomes an affectionate
acknowledgment that a well-known work has become both institutionalized in our culture and fair
game for some fun. For example, Peter De Vriess "To His Importunate Mistress" gently mocks
Andrew Marvells "To His Coy Mistress."
Persona Literally, a persona is a mask. In literature, a persona is a speaker created by a writer to tell a
story or to speak in a poem. A persona is not a character in a story or narrative, nor does a persona
necessarily directly reflect the authors personal voice. A persona is a separate self, created by and
distinct from the author, through which he or she speaks. See also narrator.
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Personification A form of metaphor in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things.
Personification offers the writer a way to give the world life and motion by assigning familiar human
behaviors and emotions to animals, inanimate objects, and abstract ideas. For example, in Keatss "Ode
on a Grecian Urn," the speaker refers to the urn as an "unravished bride of quietness." See also
metaphor.
Petrarchan sonnet See also sonnet.
Picture poem A type of open form poetry in which the poet arranges the lines of the poem so as to
create a particular shape on the page. The shape of the poem embodies its subject; the poem becomes a
picture of what the poem is describing. Michael McFees "In Medias Res" is an example of a picture
poem. See also open form.
Poetic diction See diction.
Prose poem A kind of open form poetry that is printed as prose and represents the most clear opposite
of fixed form poetry. Prose poems are densely compact and often make use of striking imagery and
figures of speech. See also fixed form, open form.
Prosody The overall metrical structure of a poem. See also meter.
Pun A play on words that relies on a words having more than one meaning or sounding like another
word. Shakespeare and other writers use puns extensively, for serious and comic purposes; in Romeo
and Juliet (III.i.101), the dying Mercutio puns, "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave
man." Puns have serious literary uses, but since the eighteenth century, puns have been used almost
purely for humorous effect. See also comedy.
Quatrain A four-line stanza. Quatrains are the most common stanzaic form in the English language;
they can have various meters and rhyme schemes. See also meter, rhyme, stanza.
Rhyme The repetition of identical or similar concluding syllables in different words, most often at the
ends of lines. Rhyme is predominantly a function of sound rather than spelling; thus, words that end
with the same vowel sounds rhyme, for instance, day, prey, bouquet, weigh, and words with the same
consonant ending rhyme, for instance vain, feign, rein, lane. Words do not have to be spelled the same
way or look alike to rhyme. In fact, words may look alike but not rhyme at all. This is called eye
rhyme, as with bough and cough, or brow and blow.
End rhyme is the most common form of rhyme in poetry; the rhyme comes at the end of the lines.
It runs through the reeds
And away it proceeds,
Through meadow and glade,
In sun and in shade.
The rhyme scheme of a poem describes the pattern of end rhymes. Rhyme schemes are mapped out by
noting patterns of rhyme with small letters: the first rhyme sound is designated a, the second becomes
b, the third c, and so on. Thus, the rhyme scheme of the stanza above is aabb. Internal rhyme places at
least one of the rhymed words within the line, as in "Dividing and gliding and sliding" or "In mist or
cloud, on mast or shroud." Masculine rhyme describes the rhyming of single-syllable words, such as
grade or shade. Masculine rhyme also occurs where rhyming words of more than one syllable, when
the same sound occurs in a final stressed syllable, as in defend and contend, betray and away. Feminine
rhyme consists of a rhymed stressed syllable followed by one or more identical unstressed syllables, as
in butter, clutter; gratitude, attitude; quivering, shivering. All the examples so far have illustrated exact
rhymes, because they share the same stressed vowel sounds as well as sharing sounds that follow the
vowel. In near rhyme (also called off rhyme, slant rhyme, and approximate rhyme), the sounds are
almost but not exactly alike. A common form of near rhyme is consonance, which consists of identical
consonant sounds preceded by different vowel sounds: home, same; worth, breath.
Rhyme scheme See rhyme.
Rhythm A term used to refer to the recurrence of stressed and unstressed sounds in poetry. Depending
on how sounds are arranged, the rhythm of a poem may be fast or slow, choppy or smooth. Poets use
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rhythm to create pleasurable sound patterns and to reinforce meanings. Rhythm in prose arises from
pattern repetitions of sounds and pauses that create looser rhythmic effects. See also meter.
Rising meter See meter.
Run-on line See enjambment.
Sarcasm See irony.
Satire The literary art of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or correct it. The object of satire is
usually some human frailty; people, institutions, ideas, and things are all fair game for satirists. Satire
evokes attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation toward its faulty subject in the hope of
somehow improving it. See also irony, parody.
Scansion The process of measuring the stresses in a line of verse in order to determine the metrical
pattern of the line. See also line, meter.
Sestet A stanza consisting of exactly six lines. See also stanza.
Sestina A type of fixed form poetry consisting of thirty-six lines of any length divided into six sestets
and a three-line concluding stanza called an envoy. The six words at the end of the first sestets lines
must also appear at the ends of the other five sestets, in varying order. These six words must also
appear in the envoy, where they often resonate important themes. An example of this highly demanding
form of poetry is Elizabeth Bishops "Sestina." See also sestet.
Setting The physical and social context in which the action of a story occurs. The major elements of
setting are the time, the place, and the social environment that frames the characters. Setting can be
used to evoke a mood or atmosphere that will prepare the reader for what is to come, as in Nathaniel
Hawthornes short story "Young Goodman Brown." Sometimes, writers choose a particular setting
because of traditional associations with that setting that are closely related to the action of a story. For
example, stories filled with adventure or romance often take place in exotic locales.
Shakespearean sonnet See sonnet.
Simile A common figure of speech that makes an explicit comparison between two things by using
words such as like, as, than, appears, and seems: "A sip of Mrs. Cooks coffee is like a punch in the
stomach." The effectiveness of this simile is created by the differences between the two things
compared. There would be no simile if the comparison were stated this way: "Mrs. Cooks coffee is as
strong as the cafeterias coffee." This is a literal translation because Mrs. Cooks coffee is compared
with something like itanother kind of coffee. See also figures of speech, metaphor.
Slant rhyme See rhyme.
Sonnet A fixed form of lyric poetry that consists of fourteen lines, usually written in iambic
pentameter. There are two basic types of sonnets, the Italian and the English. The Italian sonnet, also
known as the Petrarchan sonnet, is divided into an octave, which typically rhymes abbaabba, and a
sestet, which may have varying rhyme schemes. Common rhyme patterns in the sestet are cdecde,
cdcdcd, and cdccdc. Very often the octave presents a situation, attitude, or problem that the sestet
comments upon or resolves, as in John Keatss "On First Looking into Chapmans Homer." The
English sonnet, also known as the Shakespearean sonnet, is organized into three quatrains and a
couplet, which typically rhyme abab cdcd efef gg. This rhyme scheme is more suited to English poetry
because English has fewer rhyming words than Italian. English sonnets, because of their four-part
organization, also have more flexibility with respect to where thematic breaks can occur. Frequently,
however, the most pronounced break or turn comes with the concluding couplet, as in Shakespeares
"Shall I compare thee to a summers day?" See also couplet, iambic pentameter, line, octave, quatrain,
sestet.
Speaker The voice used by an author to tell a story or speak a poem. The speaker is often a created
identity, and should not automatically be equated with the authors self. See also narrator, persona,
point of view.
Spondee See foot.
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Stanza In poetry, stanza refers to a grouping of lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set pattern of
meter and rhyme. See also line, meter, rhyme.
Stock responses Predictable, conventional reactions to language, characters, symbols, or situations.
The flag, motherhood, puppies, God, and peace are common objects used to elicit stock responses from
unsophisticated audiences. See also clich, sentimentality.
Stream-of-consciousness technique The most intense use of a central consciousness in narration. The
stream-of-consciousness technique takes a reader inside a characters mind to reveal perceptions,
thoughts, and feelings on a conscious or unconscious level. This technique suggests the flow of thought
as well as its content; hence, complete sentences may give way to fragments as the characters mind
makes rapid associations free of conventional logic or transitions. James Joyces novel Ulysses makes
extensive use of this narrative technique. See also narrator, point of view.
Stress The emphasis, or accent, given a syllable in pronunciation. See also accent.
Style The distinctive and unique manner in which a writer arranges words to achieve particular effects.
Style essentially combines the idea to be expressed with the individuality of the author. These
arrangements include individual word choices as well as matters such as the length of sentences, their
structure, tone, and use of irony. See also diction, irony, tone.
Symbol A person, object, image, word, or event that evokes a range of additional meaning beyond and
usually more abstract than its literal significance. Symbols are educational devices for evoking complex
ideas without having to resort to painstaking explanations that would make a story more like an essay
than an experience. Conventional symbols have meanings that are widely recognized by a society or
culture. Some conventional symbols are the Christian cross, the Star of David, a swastika, or a nations
flag. Writers use conventional symbols to reinforce meanings. Kate Chopin, for example, emphasizes
the spring setting in "The Story of an Hour" as a way of suggesting the renewed sense of life that Mrs.
Mallard feels when she thinks herself free from her husband. A literary or contextual symbol can be a
setting, character, action, object, name, or anything else in a work that maintains its literal significance
while suggesting other meanings. Such symbols go beyond conventional symbols; they gain their
symbolic meaning within the context of a specific story. For example, the white whale in Melvilles
Moby-Dick takes on multiple symbolic meanings in the work, but these meanings do not automatically
carry over into other stories about whales. The meanings suggested by Melvilles whale are specific to
that text; therefore, it becomes a contextual symbol. See also allegory.
Synecdoche See metaphor.
Syntax The ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns such as phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Poets often manipulate syntax, changing conventional word order, to place certain emphasis on
particular words. Emily Dickinson, for instance, writes about being surprised by a snake in her poem
"A narrow Fellow in the Grass," and includes this line: "His notice sudden is." In addition to the
alliterative hissing s-sounds here, Dickinson also effectively manipulates the lines syntax so that the
verb is appears unexpectedly at the end, making the snakes hissing presence all the more "sudden."
Telling See character.
Tercet A three-line stanza. See also stanza, triplet.
Terza rima An interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on. Dantes The
Divine Comedy and Frosts "Acquainted with the Night" are written in terza rima. See also rhyme,
tercet.
Theme The central meaning or dominant idea in a literary work. A theme provides a unifying point
around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols, and other elements of a work are
organized. It is important not to mistake the theme for the actual subject of the work; the theme refers
to the abstract concept that is made concrete through the images, characterization, and action of the
text. In nonfiction, however, the theme generally refers to the main topic of the discourse.
Tone The authors implicit attitude toward the reader or the people, places, and events in a work as
revealed by the elements of the authors style. Tone may be characterized as serious or ironic, sad or
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happy, private or public, angry or affectionate, bitter or nostalgic, or any other attitudes and feelings
that human beings experience. See also style.
Triplet A tercet in which all three lines rhyme. See also tercet.
Trochaic meter See foot.
Understatement The opposite of hyperbole, understatement (or litotes) refers to a figure of speech that
says less than is intended. Understatement usually has an ironic effect, and sometimes may be used for
comic purposes, as in Mark Twains statement, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." See
also hyperbole, irony.
Verbal irony See irony.
Verse A generic term used to describe poetic lines composed in a measured rhythmical pattern, that are
often, but not necessarily, rhymed. See also line, meter, rhyme, rhythm.
Villanelle A type of fixed form poetry consisting of nineteen lines of any length divided into six
stanzas: five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The first and third lines of the initial tercet rhyme; these
rhymes are repeated in each subsequent tercet (aba) and in the final two lines of the quatrain (abaa).
Line 1 appears in its entirety as lines 6, 12, and 18, while line 3 reappears as lines 9, 15, and 19. Dylan
Thomass "Do not go gentle into that good night" is a villanelle. See also fixed form, quatrain, rhyme,
tercet.

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Analysis: Poetry
Consider some of the questions offered below.
In order to answer the first set of questions, you must pay extremely close attention to details. You
must take the time to look up any words that you do not understand and to ponder why certain
metaphors or figures of speech were chosen to be used at that position in the poem. Remember also that
the English language has changed over the centuries and that words we use today may have had a
slightly different meaning in earlier times.

1- Who is the speaker? What kind of person is the speaker?
2- Is there an identifiable audience for the speaker? What can you know about this audience?
3- What is the occasion?
4- What is the setting in time (hour, season, century, etc.)?
5- What is the setting in place (indoors or out, city or country, land or sea, region, country, etc.)?
6- What is the central purpose of the poem?
7- What is the poem about? State the central idea or theme of the poem in a single sentence.
8- What is the tone of the poem? How is it achieved?
9- Outline the poem so as to show its structure and development. What kind of poem is it (ode, sonnet,
dramatic monologue, lyric poem, etc.)? Why is this type of poem an appropriate means to communicate
the author's theme?
10- Summarize the events of the poem.
11- Paraphrase the poem.
12- Discuss the diction (the word choice) of the poem. Point out words that are particularly well chosen
and explain why.
13- Discuss the imagery of the poem. What kinds of imagery are used? Is there any structure to the
imagery?
14- Point out and explain any symbols. If the poem is allegorical, explain the allegory.
15- Point out examples of metaphor, simile, conceit, personification, metonymy, or any other literary
device and explain their significance and/or appropriateness.
16- Point out and explain any examples of paradox, overstatement, understatement, and/or irony. What
is their function? Why are they used?
17- Point out and explain any allusions. What is their function? Why are they used?
18- Point out significant examples of sound repetition and explain their function.
19- How is the poem constructed? What are its units of organization (quatrains, paragraphs, couplets,
etc.)? How are these units linked together (continued metaphor, pro and con, linked sound patterns,
logical syllogism, train of thought, etc.)?
20- What is the meter of the poem? Copy the poem and mark each syllable as accented (stressed) or
unaccented (unstressed), divide the lines into feet (two syllable units). Then, identify the pattern of
accented and unaccented syllables and the pattern of the rhymes, and note any significant variations
from those patterns.
21- Read the poem out loud. Determine if any sounds in the poem relate to topics discussed within the
poem (for example, short, choppy syllables with repeated "ee" sounds could relate to a chirping bird
discussed in the poem).
22- State the form or pattern of the poem (line length, stanza length, number of stanzas, etc.)
23- Evaluate the poem. How well did it achieve its purpose? How well did it communicate its central
idea or theme?

All of the previous questions lead to your being able to answer convincingly larger analytical questions.
In order to answer those questions, you must analyze the information from the above questions. Use
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this information to construct a convincing and persuasive reading of the piece as a whole and to suggest
the significance of the piece in increasing the reader's understanding of a particular issue, literary
process, etc.
1- How do all of the poem's parts (structure, organization, language use, meter, literary devices, etc.)
contribute to the effect of the piece of a whole?
2- What does the poem do (convert the reader, create shock, nostalgia, or fear, evoke a mood, etc.)?
3- If you taught this poem in class, what might you use to introduce and to illustrate it (how a
metaphysical conceit works, portrait of the ideal lover, etc.)?
Source: Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: Introduction to Poetry, Harcourt Brace and World Inc.,
New York, 1963. pg 25